BOOK reMARKS

Richmond has seen more than its fair share of history. Although it is probably best known as the site of one of the first English settlements in America and for its role as the Confederate capital in the Civil War, the city's past has much more to offer. Since 1992, Harry Kollatz Jr. has been recording the lesser-known heritage of Virginia's Holy City in his "Flashback" column in Richmond Magazine. From the inauguration of the world's first practical electric trolley system and early civils rights activists, to a psychic horse and a wild ride on a sturgeon, he has covered it all. Compiled for the first time in this volume, this selection of articles is sure to delight all who love Richmond by shedding light on some of the city's lesser-known stories.

Harry Kollatz Jr, a Richmond native, has been writing for Richmond Magazine for 14 years.

Cabell Library F234.R557 K65 2007

Note: Quick Picks are new to the collection. Some may not yet have reached the shelves. If you want to check out an item that is not yet available, click the "Is this item available?" link in the catalog record, then click the "Request" link.

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Celebrating Black History Month at the VCU Libraries

Reviewed by Kevin Farley, Collection Librarian for the Humanities

Richmond, Virginia, by local author Elvatrice Parker Belsches (part of the Black America Series from Arcadia Publishing), is profusely illustrated with historic photographs of people and places associated with the African-American experience. Belsches provides a comprehensive survey of this crucial, and often overlooked, aspect of Richmond history. Ranging from contributions to business, education, entertainment, medicine, politics, and religion, Belsches charts the increasing growth of influence of Richmond's black citizens on the life of the city. Essay-length captions accompany rare photographs, establishing a timeline of pivotal moments that define the importance of these contributions to Richmond. The chapter on the role of blacks in the medical field includes biographies of Dr. Sara G. Jones -- "one of the first African Americans to pass the medical boards in Virginia" in 1893 -- and Dr. John Howlette O.D., D.O.S. -- "a pioneering optometrist in Richmond who practiced for over 50 years within the historic Jackson Ward district." Belsches also emphasizes the role of organizations and societies that served as professional supports for those who sought to improve the life of black Richmonders in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although seldom remembered now, the contributions of the individuals Belsches commemorates should never be forgotten.

VCU Libraries presents a talk by Elvatrice Parker Belsches today, from 2-3:30 at Tompkins-McCaw Library, in the Distance Education Room, 2-010, with a reception and book-signing to follow in the Special Collections Reading Room at Tompkins-McCaw Library. Belsches will present "Above and Beyond: A Celebration of the Leonard Graduates," on her work documenting the contributions of graduates of the Leonard Medical School graduates of Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina to Richmond in the early 20th century. For further information and details, please visit the VCU Libraries Black History Month website, at http://www.library.vcu.edu/bhm/.

VCU Libraries Special Collections (Reference, Non-Circulating) F234.R59 N424 2002

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Celebrating Black History Month at the VCU Libraries

Reviewed by Ray Bonis, Archival Assistant for Collections, Special Collections and Archives

Although the documentation by historians and archivists of Richmond's African American history began in earnest in the 1970s, a complete monographic history of black Richmond has yet to be written. A new work published this year on the city's architectural history comes close. It covers subjects ranging from slavery and the emergence of freed peoples and their leaders to the city's African American churches and once vibrant neighborhoods.

Built by Blacks: African American Architecture and Neighborhoods in Richmond, Virginia was published by the Alliance to Conserve Old Richmond Neighborhoods (A.C.O.R.N.), the highly visible and successful local preservationist group which has purchased and renovated a number of vacant and abandoned properties in the city. Their interest in Richmond's African American history, including their preservation advocacy of structures built before and after the Civil War, led to the publication of this book. Built by Blacks was written by Selden Richardson, former Archivist for Architectural Records at the Library of Virginia, who currently serves as the President of the Board of A.C.O.R.N. Dr. Maurice Duke, a professor emeritus of English at VCU and a local historian, provided many of the photographs for the book. Archival images from Richardson's own collection are also used as illustrations.

Built By Blacks provides the architectural history of many Richmond landmark buildings and biographies of several Richmond African American architects and builders. Richardson's plea throughout the book is for city leaders and planners to preserve what is left of black Richmond. He writes in the introduction that the loss of "Richmond's architectural fabric, from iconic downtown offices and stores to humble bungalows is being compounded constantly." Readers of Built By Blacks will appreciate even more the loss of Richmond's historic cityscape.

Cabell Library – Special Collections and Archives E 185.92 R53 2007
Cabell Library E 185.92 R53 2007

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Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Reference Librarian for Government and Public Affairs

In this beautiful novel, Geraldine Brooks breathes life into Mr. March, the father in Louisa May Alcott's beloved Little Women. As March is largely absent from Alcott's story, it is Brooks who truly introduces us to this character whom we follow from his youthful days as a peddler in the south to his post as a Union chaplain in the Civil War — first ministering to soldiers and later as the teacher at a contraband farm. Self-taught scholar, passionate abolitionist, and unorthodox clergyman, March is modeled on Alcott's father, Bronson Alcott, with inspiration drawn from his own papers, as well as those of friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

Narrated in the first person by March (with some chapters from wife Marmee's point of view), this very personal account of war, with all its brutality, inhumanity, and both physical and emotional suffering is quite disturbing, and difficult to read at times. Yet it is nicely interspersed with reminiscences of the Marches' domestic life in Concord, Massachusetts, which help create the rich character development of both March and Marmee. March won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Interested in more by Brooks, or other works about the Civil War? Check out Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks, or Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by her husband, Tony Horwitz.

Cabell Library PR9619.3.B7153 M37 2005
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Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Government Information Librarian

A CIA agent, a shaman, and a defrocked nun. Sound like another joke of the "guy walked into a bar" variety? These are some of the characters who populate this Tom Robbins tale that explores everything from religion, miracles, and taboos to sex, drugs, and Broadway show tunes. The novel follows Switters, a hedonistic, renegade CIA operative, from an unusual errand in Peru to Seattle to Syria to the Vatican. Along the way, he is cursed by a shaman, tries to woo his sixteen-year-old stepsister, and falls in with a convent of desert nuns who harbor a secret document of world-changing magnitude. Sound like a good time? This kooky plot is a perfect vehicle for Robbins's trademark finesse of the English language. His similes would make any English teacher swoon: "Overhead, the lemons swung like papier-mâché stars in a cheesy planetarium." After reading his prose, you'll see why Robbins was named by Writer's Digest as one of the 100 best writers of the 20th century.

Want to read more Tom Robbins? Check out Another Roadside Attraction.

Cabell Library PS3568.O233 F54 2000 Various Locations

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Reviewed by Curtis Lyons, Head, Special Collections and Archives

Beatnik and counter-culture icon Tom Robbins has published 8 novels and a number of popular short stories in which he irreverently looks at institutions and societies from his own enhanced perspective. You can rely on him to bring unusual issues and characters to the forefront in each and every story or book, but his first book, Another Roadside Attraction, offers the most entertaining insights into the thought-processes of some uniquely American movements. Since it was a first attempt, the book does not flow as well as his later and more polished works, especially the best-selling Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (great book, avoid the movie). But Robbins has some important, not to mention outlandish, things to say in this book, arguably to a greater extent than his other novels. If anything, the bits of rather raw writing work into the overall feeling that you are experiencing something as it takes shape instead of just being told a story. I'm not sure I would recommend this as an introduction to Robbins's work (Cowgirls is probably better there), but if you have read other Robbins works but skipped this one then you should pick it up. And if you are not familiar with his work but are in the mood to have your vision of the world expanded, try Cowgirls and then I think you'll run out to taste Another Roadside Attraction.

Cabell Library PS3568.O233 Various Locations

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Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

Set in antebellum Virginia, in fictional Manchester County, The Known World is a 2004 Pulitzer Prize winner and debut novel by Edward P. Jones. It examines the paradoxical circumstances surrounding a free black class that owns slaves. The book opens with the death of freed slave Henry Townsend, who owns a plantation and 33 slaves. Responsibility for operating the plantation is left to his wife, Caldonia and before long, things begin to fall apart. Slaves escape, free blacks are resold into slavery, and masters and slaves grow increasingly suspicious of each other. This is a highly intricate novel--the reader is introduced not only to the Townsends, but to their parents, most of their slaves, their teacher, Henry's former owner, neighbors, the white law enforcement officers patrolling the county, and several others. Despite the breadth of characters presented, rarely are they purely good or purely evil--even Henry's former master who often treated his slaves harshly is depicted as a doting father to his children and lifelong mentor to Henry. To explain how free blacks viewed slave ownership, one character comments "It is not the same as owning people in your own family. It is not the same at all...All of us do only what the law and God tell us we can do. No one of us who believes in the law and God does more than that...We owned slaves. It was what was done, and so that is what we did."

Cabell Library PS3560.O4813 K58 2003

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Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

To celebrate Banned Book Week, which is September 24 - October 1, I reread a childhood favorite, Bridge to Terabithia. I first read this in fifth grade; I vividly remember sobbing as I read the ending and wondered if I would do the same thing this time around. Set in rural Virginia, this book is about a friendship that changes ordinary life into a world of imagination and magic. The two main characters are fifth graders Jess and Leslie. Leslie is the new kid in school and after a rocky start, becomes Jess's best friend. Together, they invent a secret world called Terabithia, which they rule as King and Queen and defend against opposing foes. When Jess is faced with the tragic loss of his best friend, he is at a crossroads--will he abandon Terabithia and refuse to heal after Leslie's death, or will he accept the challenge of ruling Terabithia alone? While as a ten-year-old, I cried when Leslie died, this time I was most struck by the simple beauty of Jess's grief in the days that follow. This was especially touching after learning that Katherine Paterson wrote this novel for her young son after his best friend died. Perhaps because of the subject matter, Newbery Medal winner Bridge to Terabithia is ranked #9 on the top 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books (1990-2000).

Cabell Library Juvenile Literature (4th Floor) PZ7.P273 B7

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Reviewed by Curtis Lyons, Head, Special Collections and Archives

VCU alumna Sheri Reynolds writes a poignant novel from the point of view of Ninah Huff, a girl coming of age in an isolated southern religious community led by her grandfather, the founder of the Church of Fire and Brimstone and God's Almighty Baptizing Wind. The Rapture of Canaan was a 1997 Oprah Book Club pick, and describes the past and future of this community and its founder. Squarely in the Southern Gothic literary tradition, this novel culminates with a series of events, perhaps even a miracle, which force Ninah to face the realities of the community and make difficult choices for herself and those who depend on her. The community has its own personality within which its members, all well-developed characters, must reconcile their own.

Cabell Library PS3568 .E8975 R36 1995

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Reviewed by Curtis Lyons, Head, Special Collections and Archives

Richmond author James Branch Cabell was catapulted to national prominence when the State of New York unsuccessfully attempted to ban his book Jurgen in 1920. Jurgen is Cabell's simultaneous indictment and defense of the conventions of love, marriage, and sex, complete with very thinly veiled sexual symbolism (very tame by today's standards).

Jurgen, a monstrous clever fellow, is a middle-aged pawn-broker who believes he could have been so much more as he sets off in search of his ensorcelled wife, taken from him in response to an ill-fated remark he made to a stranger. Along the way he is helped and hindered by the likes of Merlin, Helen of Troy, Grandfather Satan, Queen Guinevere, and many other figures from the canon of western literature and is allowed to relive his youth and the lives and loves that he missed out on the first time around.

Cabell is in the satiric tradition of Cervantes, Erasmus, Rabelais, and Swift and was a major influence on Robert Heinlein and Neil Gaiman. You can read more about Cabell and his works at theVCU Libraries Special Collections and Archives online exhibit.

Cabell Library PS3505 .A153 J8 (Multiple Copies in Stacks and Special Collections and Archives. Check VCU Libraries Catalog for holdings information)

Full Text of Jurgen from Documenting the American South

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Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

If you like nonfiction that reads like fiction, or if you think you don't like nonfiction at all, try Confederates in the Attic by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tony Horwitz. He wrote this book shortly after settling in Virginia following several years as a journalist overseas. Living in the South rekindled a childhood fascination with the Civil War and he set out on a quest to discover what it is about that war in particular that continues to endure in the present-day, particularly among Southerners. He decided to spend a year traveling throughout the South, where virtually all Civil War action took place. Horwitz visits cities such as Charleston, South Carolina and Vicksburg, Mississippi, as well as Civil War battlefields, including Shiloh and Antietam. Of particular interest to Richmonders is the time Horwitz spent in the capital of the Confederacy and the surrounding battlefields and historic sites. Of Richmond, Horwitz writes: "The city seemed somehow more Southern than I'd expected. There was a geniality and leisure in the way people spoke and smiled at each other that resonated much more of Memphis or Charleston, a day's drive away, than of Virginia cities just a short distance north." He visited Hollywood Cemetery and Monument Avenue, and attended the debate about placing the Arthur Ashe statue at one end. While this book is written with wit and humor, it also addresses serious issues of racism, regional differences, perception, and ways people give meaning to historical events; while in Richmond, Horwitz poses a question he'd been considering throughout his trip: whether or not there is "such a thing as politically correct remembrance of the Confederacy? Or was any attempt to honor the Cause inevitably tainted by what Southerners once delicately referred to as their 'peculiar institution'?"

Cabell Library E468.9 .H78 1998

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