GA

The thing I enjoyed most about this book was the pace of the story. It didn't drag on and on with pages of boring details. Even though it was a fairly quick read, there was enough information about people's surroundings, the family connections, etc., to make it interesting and hold the reader's attention. As for the whodunnit, that was fairly easy to figure out, but it didn't take away from the book. I will definitely take the time to read more books by this author.

I don't usually go for such light-hearted mysteries, I prefer more gore and murder. But I picked this up after a friend recommended it to me, and I was not disappointed. Having grown up in and around Atlanta my whole life, it was fun to read the fictional events and actually picture where they were taking place. I could just see where the murder occured, where Callihan lived and ate, where her relatives lived. I guess that was the most appealing thing about this book. You may have to live in Atlanta to truly like it.

That said, the story was quick and interesting. You know almost from the beginning 'whodunnit', but keep reading to see him get caught. I don't think this book was as close to the Tokars case as some may think, but there were some similarites. I picked this book up on Saturday morning and was done by the next day. I may read more of her books, if just to enjoy the local setting a bit more.

These may be considered cozies, but they have a distinct edge. The characters are fun, but also well developed, and the plots are decent. The characters and their personalities are complex. The books improve as they go along. I was panting for the last one, "Irish Eyes." I even bought the hardback. Am waiting for the next one. Begin at the beginning if you can, but not necessary.

Flannery O'Connor is arguably one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. She was passionately Southern and passionately Catholic, dedicated to her craft and a consummate professional.

This is why I think she would have scorned her recent biography, written by Jean Cash.

Cash's work is merely competent. She has all the facts straight. The book is well-researched, and well documented. Cash has flipped over every O'Connor stone, but there are so few unpublished gems at this point, that the project seems to be simply one of repetition.

What makes Cash's biography especially defective is that she seems afraid to make qualitative judgments regarding O'Connor or her work. I suppose this can be good in other biographies of lesser-known literary figures. The biography falls short, in other words, precisely because of its attention to detail, and its lack of synthesis. There are times when it reads like a shopping list of O'Connor things, places, friends and relatives. Cash's prose falls lifeless into the annals of poorly-written biographies.

I only recall Cash voicing her opinion three times. She defends O'Connor's relationship with Maryat Lee as a perfectly heterosexual one. On another occasion, she defends O'Connor, who, throughout her life and private letters, made a few controversial statements regarding the Civil Rights movement: these have since tagged her as racist to some scholars. Cash also frequently asserts that O'Connor was not a reclusive person, a kind of 1950s Emily Dickenson. Of these assertions, only the second seems to have any direct bearing on her writing. It seems that her focus should have been directed to other facets of O'Connor's life.

Cash's thoughts often read like terse journal articles that have been assembled into a book as an afterthought. It is sometimes difficult to read her rather fibrous prose, which fails to synthesize multiple tellings of any particular O'Connor account into a single cohesive narrative.

Robert Fitzgerald's introduction to _Everything That Rises Must Converge_ accomplishes in about 25 pages what took Cash over 300. Besides, Fitzgerald's introduction was written by somebody who knew O'Connor, and who considered her family. But the best part about buying _Everything that Rises..._ is that instead of being forced to read a synthesis of quotes, the reader can actually look at 9 pieces of O'Connor's short fiction.

Cash's FLANNERY O'CONNOR: A LIFE is a noble attempt to define and to find the Southern Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor. However, though the biography is full of facts and details about O'Connor's studies and speaking tours and friendships, it is a book that features conclusions drawn from one or two events or incidents. This problem is particularly evident, it seems, in the opening chapters about O'Connor's early years.
Another nagging problem is the frequent errors in editing or writing: extra words, missing words, odd punctuation, and a strange abundance of parentheses when a simple revision would clarify the sentences. This reviewer wonders why such mistakes coat the book like red Georgia dust. If the book ever has another edition, it will need plenty of attention to bring it up to professional standards.
It's all too bad; the basics of a good biography are there, and the subject is fascinating.
Best advice: read O'Connor's works and save the biography for occasional filler if you have the interest.

Better than *Publisher's Weekly* suggests, Jean Cash's life of Flannery O'Connor still it isn't all it could be. Its strengths are its fidelity to the events of O'Connor's largely unexciting life as a practicing writer and Catholic and, in this age of the doorstop biography, its modest length. Cash mines *The Habit of Being,* Sally Fitzgerald's 1979 collection of letters, and the archives she dutifully has read through. O'Connor's brilliance, orneriness, intractibility, deadpan humor, courage, honor, talent (at least by repute), and doggedness come through. In some ways, that's enough--four stars. However, one who finishes this book may still want more.

What is missing? An extended understanding of the interplay the fiction and the life, for one. Why did Hazel Motes and Julian and Tarwater and Rayber come out in just that form? When Cash discusses the connections between O'Connor's mother, Regina Cline O'Connor, and Mrs. Hopewell (in "Good Country People"), her book takes on life. More, more! Again, without naming it or discussing it at any length Cash points to the self-loathing that was the other side of O'Connor's spirituality and selflessness. The presentation needs pointing up, development.

For another, a sense of O'Connor's achievement as an artist. The fiction, which is what counts or we wouldn't be reading the life, is almost not there. My own judgment is that the two novels matter much less than and are ungainly compared to half a dozen stories, in which form perfectly embodies vision--with humor, intellectual force, and the many-sidedness of a great writer. This text needs more engagement with O'Connor's text.

Finally, Edward F. O'Connor, the father. His death, when his daughter was fifteen, surely underlies what Cash describes as the "matriarchal" world of the fiction. If it bears on Flannery O'Connor's own atrophied love life and even for her choice of *What Maisie Knew* as the work of Henry James that most interests her, those connections should be made. Cash has the facts, but the figure in the carpet needs highlighting. Otherwise, one might as well read Sally Fitzgerald's nineteen page biographical sketch at the end of the Library of America volume on O'Connor.

It is unfair to blame the author for this, but the decorative peacock feather ovals make the page numbers hard to read!

Being a graduate of Infantry Officer Candidate School, I appreciated Mark Busby bringing a portion of that experience back to me. OCS, like combat, was an experience that cannot be described or explained to anyone who did not live it themselves.
There is not a day that OCS does not come back to me in some form. Mark Busby says the same thing. He also states in his Dedication that all of our gereration who lived through the 60's and 70's are veterans of Viet Nam on some level. This is certainly true. Those times were very formative for each of us and also important in the journey of the United States. The novel successfully tries to capture the dynamics of 6 months of intense training; but importantly it struggles with the dilema that all of us faced. How do we balance our sense of duty as soldiers to our country and families with our distaste for any war and particularly the Viet Nam war? It was a struggle that each of our generation faced and each of us took our own personal road depending on our own personal conclusion. Fort Benning Blues concluded with one of those roads. Those were difficult decisions and difficult times. I appreciate the author presenting this work for those of us who can identify with it and also for those who cannot not. I plan on getting the book for my three children. I think it will help them to understand their father and those truly intersting times.

Those who feel they do not fit the profile of the typical war novel enthusiast should not let that consideration prevent them from picking up Mark Busby's _Fort Benning Blues_. For in many ways, the novel is atypical of the genre, and it is these moments of divergence that make the novel stimulating and enjoyable. What most distinguishes Busby's efforts from other, similarly-themed offerings, and what serves as the novel's strongest point, is the high level of literary consciousness that the author brings to his narrative. Arguably, all serious writers bring to their work an awareness of their literary predescessors, of being imbedded in context or tradition, but Busby uses this anxiety of influence in a unique way, creating a protagonist who is aware of the bounds and conventions and classic works of the genre in which he is circumscribed. From the beginning of the story, when Jeff Adams relates the collection of fiction he has brought with him to Officer Candidate School, to the novel's Yossarianesque conclusion, books are central to Busby's tale of Vietnam viewed from the margins. This literary consciousness is the heart and soul of the novel, the secret life that compels and inspires the actions and attitudes of its characters. Though the narrative ostensibly depicts the boredoms and stresses and tyrannies of Fort Benning, and though it portrays the by-now standard conflict between one's duty to country and one's moral aversion to war, _Fort Benning Blues_ is actually, if we look closer, a book about books, an exploration of the relationship between literature and marginality, books and the state. Thus, the interesting question that emerges from the novel is this: how much of Jeff Adams's ambivalence and hesitancy about his role in the Vietnam conflict results from the fact that he reads, that he has a deep and personal familiarity with books renowned for their critical perspectives on war and resistance? That Vietnam was morally questionable is by now well-established in literature and film; also patently obvious is the fact that Jefferson Bowie Adams II, grandson and namesake of his proud veteran grandfather, carries the weight of history and familial expectation upon his shoulders. What is less apparent, however, is the fact that Adams's scholarly affiliations make him scion of an equally weighty heritage; he is as beholden to literary forebears Joseph Heller and Ernest Hemingway as he is to a sense of duty engendered on the part of his military lineage. In this way, we can see that what is less apparent about the novel--namely, its literary consciousness--is also its most important and outstanding feature, and that it is this understated and subtle feature which ultimately makes _Fort Benning Blues_ more than just another story among many about the Vietnam era.

Mark Busby's FORT BENNING BLUES will appeal best to male readers who were subject to the Vietnam War draft, an entire generation of American men who, one way or another, had to wrap their heads around the idea that though there was now such a thing as "limited war," there was still no such thing as "limited death." In other words, they had to confront the very real possibility that they could give their lives for a war with very uncertain goals. Their fathers and grandfathers may have fought in World War II or Korea (or both), but the objectives of WWII were never in doubt, and Korea came early enough in the "cold war" that almost everyone believed Communism both monolithic and omni-threatening. Vietnam was 'way different, and Busby explores that difference via his protagonist, Jeff Adams, a Texan with a proud sense of heritage and common sense to go with it: enough pride to recognize his legacy and responsibility, enough common sense to be fearful and to desire a defensible meaning to the risks he faces.
We follow Adams as he takes the route many bright young men of the era took--Officers Candidate School. Adams's "blues," then, have to do with the dues he knows he must pay, and the novel's resonance comes from the way Busby re-creates those troubled times, times that exacted internal wars of conscience among most Americans, regardless of whether or not they were of draft age. Some readers might consider Busby's literary debts ranging from William Faulkner to British World War I-era poet Henry Reed a bit too artificial; still others might think he makes too much use of coincidence (Adams happens to be William Calley's driver during the My Lai trial, and he manages to see newspaper headlines that inform him of the Kent State killings).
Adams's resolution of his conflict--his Fort Benning Blues--may not please all readers, but it is a resolution many of that era found, making this as genuine a tale of courage as any told by other "veterans" of the Vietnam War, a war that we now know even our President, Lyndon Johnson, tragically questioned, tragically could not bring himself to stop.

I did not find this book any more helpful than the Charleston Area 2003 Official Visitors Guide that I ordered for free on the internet (I'd give you the url, but it's not allowed, so do a search). It did offer information on hotels, which the free guide did not. However, the free book gave more information on local events, tours, and sightseeing. This book is not worth the money, get the free one!

This little guide was very helpful in planing my trip to Savannah, Ga and Charleston, SC. Great companion to "The Best Little Map of Savannah, GA" and The Best Little Map of Charleston, SC", also, must haves for vactioning in these two cities.

This was a great portable guide for Savannah. We were only there for 3 days and we went to a number of the restaurants and sites listed. I had also bought Moon Guides' Savannah and Charleston book and it was not as well organized as this guide was. It fit perfect into my little bag also.

This directory is OK if you're only interested in a few suburban counties. There are 20 counties that make up greater Atlanta, however. You can get better information, by county, by city, or by school from the Georgia Department of Education's website. It will likely be fresher data; most importantly, it will cost you nothing.

As a person moving to Atlanta from another part of the country, this book proved to be a great source of information. Would recommend this to anyone moving to Atlanta or deciding where to move to so their children will be placed in a great school.

When we lived in Atlanta this book provided some great ideas on places to go visting. But I never felt if provided the richness I might have hoped for, and we were occassionally dissapointed in the locations. If you are new to town, I would pick this up.

This is a great book to get know Atlanta. Most of the walks are 5 miles or less. The book has lots of maps and points of interest. I found it fun to walk and bike Atlanta when I first moved here. Great gift for someone moving or new to Atlanta

This book contains some valuable information, however some information is dated (it hasn't been revised since publication). Out of the fifty-one pages, half are cartoon-type illustrations and some pages contain only a few sentences. It fails to touch on some major points such as the relay-service and tty answering machines. This book might a good investment for a company that has to train people to use a tty on a regular basis. Even then it is a bit tedious shuffling through the pages for an amount of knowledge that could be contained on a sheet of looseleaf.

A great resource for anyone wanting to use a TTY in the appropriate manner with deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals. Many stores have TTYs for the deaf and hard-of-hearing to use, but do not know who to use them theirselves.
Great !

If you have ever read up on the physics behind the principles of combustion, force, and friction to be able to fix your car's motor, then this book is for you. If, however, you trust that the people publishing roto projections and dollar amounts can't be too far apart on their methodology, then take a decent average of the amounts given in various magazine publications and leave this one on the shelf. This book has a high level of research that you'll have to do to make use of it's contents, and you'll need a computer spreadsheet for the data entry and calculations required, but if you've got the time (and no wife...) it's a winner.

The book is great for beginners and for experienced roto guys. McGee lays out a simple way to value players as well as a more complicated option theory approach. The only drawback I see is that the baselines he uses are a little dated (1996) because of the home run explosion and expansion. Overall, a great book.

For those of you that have wrestled with the issue of dollar values, position scarcity and valuing a player's future value in preparation for your rotisserie draft, this book is for you. McGee outlines a step-by-step method to set up his insightful valuation method in a spreadsheet. It really makes sense and it works too! I have been using the McGee method for the past two seasons and it has noticeably improved my draft performance. With all the information readily available to fellow owners it is much more difficult to find an edge at draft day. My spreadsheet gives me that edge.

It took me an hour or two to set up the spreadsheet the first year, but since then, I just plug and play.

I feel untrue in even giving this book 1 star. I have spent a great deal of time on Cumberland island and have a great love for the island and it's true story. This book did a complete injustice to Cumberland and to literature in general. The characters were flat and wouldn't have even been allowed into the worst episode of Murder She Wrote. Ben Reese was the only character that made me continue the painful experience of reading this book but even his scenes were as dry as reading a road sign. As far as mysteries go, this was completely unbelievable - the method of Hannah's murder and the steps that the the murderer would have had to go through are illogical and don't even really fit the clues. The innocent, sweet niece that the reader is supposed to care about is the biggest idiot of all time - 'I know you are acting very suspicious, and I know you've tried to kill me in the past, but I'll drink that coffee you are offering cause I'm just too stupid to live.' I cannot think of a single redeeming quality of this book. I never throw away books but I didn't want this one to remain in my house. I thought of giving it to a friend, but I don't know anyone I dislike that much. If anyone wants to read this book, I will gladly send you my copy free of charge.

Cumberland Island had been in Charlotte Hill MacKinnon's family for over eighty years. She "suddenly" died from an aortic aneurysm, according to the reports. She willed the island to Hannah Hill, a widow suffering from MS, who would continue Charlotte's fight to keep the land from developers.

Ben Reese was Charlotte's nephew. He went to the island, visited Hannah, and listened to her tale about a disguised intruder who entered her room during the night to spray some sort of mist and wore a gas mask. Hannah had thought it a dream. Short days later, even though her own doctor thought Hannah doing better, she mysteriously died.

Ben suspected foul play and began asking questions. The killer knew of Ben's reputation for snooping whenever his curiosity became aroused. Ben would have to be watched closely.

**** Great mystery reading here. It was a bit hard to get into the story at the beginning. The characters kept dying after only being in the story for one or two chapters. However, when Ben Reese entered the story it became engrossing. A sharp man who not only copes with the Cumberland Island problem, but also a problem (sub-plot) at the Alderton University involving an old will and the new president. Recommended for true mystery fans! ****

Reviewed by Detra Fitch.

In 1960, Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia is one of last barrier islands to be privately owned by an individual. Charlotte Hill MacKinnon, the owner of most of the land intends to keep it that way. When she dies, she leaves her holdings on Cumberland Island to Hannah Williams Hill, her sister in law. Hannah feels the same way about Cumberland as Charlotte did and she intends to fight off the developers and the Parks Department who want to take it by eminent domain.

Even though she is in the end stages of multiple sclerosis, her mind is clear and she asks her nephew, archivist Ben Reese to help her. Ben has one satisfying conversation with Hannah before she dies and he wants to help the new heir, Johanna Elliott, a shy retiring opera singer who intends to carry out her aunt's wishes. Ben isn't sure that Hannah died from natural causes so he starts his own investigation just to make sure that there isn't a killer on the loose ready to strike again.

Sally Wright is a very talented, very visual writer who describes Cumberland Island in such detail that readers will feel they have visited the place. The fourth Reese mystery is the best yet, primarily because the audience feels closer to the protagonist. OUT OF THE RUINS is a cerebral brainteaser that will appeal to fans of literary mysteries.

Harriet Klausner

it sucke

I hadn't heard of McGinley until I picked up this book on a discount table in Galway. It's an intriguing, powerful read, full of poetry and menace and dark humor. The ending is a little rushed and unprepared for my liking, but I suppose McGinley is sacrificing more conventional storytelling for the suddenness of myth, and I didn't object all that much to the surprising resolution. All in all, a good, engrossing novel.

I can't say enough good things about this book (along with the other works of Patrick McGinley). The voice and perspective are like nothing else I've encountered--horror dances just outside (and occasionally breaks through) a fragile circle of humor. The summary of the book I give to friends is: "It's P.G.Wodehouse meets Carl Jung with knives drawn." I look forward to the day all of McGinley's works are reissued.