The book gives a good overview of the areas with many addresses. Anyhow I found it a bit too black and white. It gives useful maps, but no coloured pictures from the areas, which would make it a bit more pleasant to read.

I highly recommend this guide to anyone who will be traveling in the Northeast as well as Canada. This guide gives you everything from upcoming events for the year to where to stay & eat. The maps are easy to read and follow. I have been a reader of the Mobil Guide for many years and it is continuing to give the most accurate, up-to-date travel information. This is the MUST-HAVE for the Northeast traveler.

Having read through most of the reviews that come before mine, I'm surprised at the number of people complaining about having to re-read sentences--as if this isn't a demand fiction should make. What I am amazed about is that this is Haynes's first work. Having grown up in Canada and only knowing the South through literature, I was very pleased with this work as it opened up an experience to me that I haven't really had before. The writing is lush and quirky and contrary to what other reviewers have said, the characters are interesting and, for the most part, well-developed. True, there are some mysteries about them, but isn't this a part of good characterization? While I cannot think of a specific Victorian novel to compare this work to, I can say it is an old-fashioned book. Like a Victorian novel (say, George Eliot's Middlemarch, for example) the novel is big and places demands. Middlemarch it is not, but it is a good book indeed that allows the reader to enter a world and a town. Also, like an old-fashioned novel, the characters are connected in ways one at first does not suspect. Unlike much modern fiction, Mother of Pearl suggests a world that is cohesive. People are related and connected and impact on each other. How much this reflects "reality", I don't know, but I personally find it satisfying in a novel. For a reader who is willing to do a bit of work or for one who favours a old-fashioned story--where there is indeed a story--this book should not in any way be a disappointment. I admire Melinda Haynes's talent.

When I began this book, I actually put it down and picked it up again months later. It is a slow-starter, pulling you in gradually, bit by bit, until you're half-in, half-out of the quicksand and not sure whether to give in or try to get out. This time, I opted for staying in, and I was glad I did.

This book contains many different plots, but as the novel reaches its conclusion, most of them blend together seamlessly and in a way that makes perfect sense... it just seems to take a while to get there. Haynes does revel in sometimes needless symbolism, and I was put off at first by the contrived similarity to Toni Morrison's _Song of Solomon_ (which was written 20 years earlier). Characters have names like Valuable Korner and Even Grade. Other characters are very unlikeable (Beryn Green, for example, father of Joleb), and some are irresistable, especially Joody Two Sun (who is a magical woman living by the river). The river is very important in the novel, as are dreams, connections between people, and family ties.

Sometimes I would have to re-read sections due to the large number of characters... I would actually lose track of what had happened to whom, even though I read the book constantly. Other aspects of the novel were frustrating and painful. However, I was thoroughly moved by the novel and was transported, finally, by Haynes' writing, which to me is the best thing a writer can do for you. I recommend this book to anyone with a little patience and some time on their hands.

In 1956 Petal, Mississippi, Black Even Grade and local seer Joody Two Sun become lovers. Not long after that Even meets teenage white girl Valuable Korner, whose mother is the town hooker. Though he loves the weird Joody, Even understands Valuable's need of family as he himself was abandoned by his mother almost three decades ago.

Meanwhile, Valuable falls in love with her neighbor Jackson McLain. However, when Valuable becomes pregnant, Jackson flees town. Still, she dreams of taking care of her "Pearl" as she calls her unborn child. However, the young girl knows her family will provide no help. She turns to Joody and Valuable to help her through her pregnancy.

MOTHER OF PEARL provides readers with a taste of small town Mississipi in the early stages of the Civil Rights movement. None of the characters seem to permanently hook the reader as much as the setting does. However, what Melinda Haynes does do is imbue her characters with human flaws and attributes that change as they do. Thouh the varying misfortunes of each of the ensemble cast overwhelms the audience at times, readers will know wht this novel is a selection of Oprah's Book Club.

Harriet Klausner

If you're looking for an accurate history of Marie LaVeau, or insight into real Voodoo, this is not the book for you. Read "Jambalaya" by Luisah Teish instead.

However, if you want to step back in time to 1950's racism--complete with the N-word--and dark rumors about Voodoo, this is the book to read. Frankly, I was horrified to note Martinez' condescending, sometimes sneering, stereotypes. This book is already in my stack of paper to recycle.

For example, Martinez says that a loincloth is "the customary dress of the Negroes in Haiti, and for that matter, South Africa and most tropical countries." And, he advises us that Marie LaVeau's snake, Zombi, "fed only upon fair and tender children."

In describing Voodoo, Martinez claims, "Marie's rituals were, of course, so outrageously vulgar that children were forbidden to witness them...no person who pretended to be self-respecting could admit that so depraved a performance was enjoyable or even interesting."

But, as another reviewer noted, you can use this book to locate newspaper articles from Marie LaVeau's era. Otherwise, it's a waste of paper, unless you want to see what once passed for a generous and kindly attitude towards people and traditions of African descent.

After finishing my first trip to New Orleans, I was hungry for more information on Marie Laveau and of voodooism. I found this little book in an airport shop and read it on the flight home. Interesting in a short story sort of way.

Overall, I found the information and stories in this book to be fascinating. The writing style, however, is sometimes a bit confusing and jumbled. Martinez does give excellent references to historical sources such as newspaper articles, and his logic in either supporting or refuting some of the legends regarding Marie Laveau are sound. As a collector of occult books, I found this one to be useful for background and history, as well as full of entertaining folk tales.

well, reading this book I felt like it was way too long! It was dragged on and on until you got sick of Huck and Jim always escaping and crap. Man, it is a waste of time. I didn't enjoy it. How dumb are the people that they don't find anything suspicious about a slave and little white boy together on a raft. They also fall for some pretty dumb lies!! Don't read it.. unless you have to for a class.. That's what I had to do!

I think that this book is exciting but is too long. This story had very rounded off characters that you could understand. I recemend this book because it is funny yet get it's points across you in the story

Volume I: Pike exhaustively recounts his daily activities on board. In almost no instance except for the frigid winter is there much drama or dialogue between he and his men. Even when he reaches what he thinks is the source of the Mississippi, he is actually mistaken, though "correct" as far as the assumptions of the day. Toward the head of the river, it is difficult to assess where Pike even is without the notes (which in themselves almost swallow the book, but of sheer necessity to the reading). We reach the headwaters of the river and return to St Louis without much fanfare or dialogue, save that Pike spoke with the English fur traders near the source and explained America's new ownership of the territory (one of his objectives).

Volume II: In this volume Pike is no better. There is an extremely boring journey across Kansas and into Colorado, and he the real drama sets in. Pike and his men are without winter clothing and now in the Colorado Rockies. The frostbite on some of his men forces them to stay behind, unable to continue. This occurs day after day, week after week, until the expedition reaches what is believed to be the source of the Arkansas River. Otherwise the volume meekly runs through Pike's capture by Spanish authorities and his return to the U.S. via Spanish escort. This last is a daily log of conversations with French or Spanish military figures, and of little interest in general.

This review refers to Volume One.I really had to struggle to get through this book. The historical documentation/notation was overwhelmingly exhausting, boring and tedious.Simply put,too much! As far as the actual journal itself is concerned, to quote Pike in his letter of July 2, 1806 to General Wilkinson, "The journal in itself will have little to strike the imagination, being a dull detail of our daily march." I agree. This is in no way to be demeaning of Pike's exploration efforts and the hardships he and his men suffered to get to the source of the Mississippi River. Pike had monumental responsibilities to accomplish. He was to find the headwaters of the Mississippi, bring peace between various Indian tribes, select future sites for government forts and trading posts, and to confer with the British establishments in the recently expanded territory of the United States.There were some highlights of the book however, one being the chapter "Correspondence and Conferences", which show Pike's letters to various individuals, and his speeches to certain Indian tribes. Also, the chapter on ethnography details the cultural aspects of the different Mississippi Indian tribes, which I found interesting. I hope Volume 2 (explorations into the
American West) will have more flavor.

Welcome to the incredibly boring world of the Mississippi Valley. If you have to read this book, the last paragraph of each chapter will sum everything up for you. There is also a ten page summary at the end of the book! So if this is required reading, don't sweat it. You can get everything you need out of this book in ten minutes! Please don't waste your time reading the entire book.

Usner's Indians, Settlers and Slaves is a highly readable and path-breaking study of economic interactions in southern Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama before the formation of the 'Old South.' Here is a world of great social complexity, and surprising equality, featuring the Upper Mississippi Valley in a time of low settlement density. A must for anyone trying to understand the long-term settlement dynamic of the South.

Growing up in the Delta I find a lot to dislike about this exercise in academic revisionism of Southern history. The author is clearly ignorant of those times that shaped the history of the Delta, the floods of 1927 and '37 followed by the migrations of black people to the North followed by the mechanical cotton picker, followed by the emmigration of light industry to the "new" south. This superficial book is typical of the ideological rectitude among apologists that permeate parochial history departments. A person wishing to understand the psyche of the Delta should read instead, "Lanterns on the Levee",or "Rising Tide", both available from Amazon.com.

I loved what the book! As a 4th generation Mississippi Deltan, seventh generation Mississippian, white , 48 year old male, I was very impressed with Mr Cobb's research. He certainly dispelled many of the myths that we were taught as we grew up from a segregated society to a desegregated society. I now live in Colorado but my family and friends still live in the Delta. I wish this book was required reading in the schools in the Delta as well as anywhere segregation and racism exists to help people better understand why these problems that continue to plague these areas will not go away. A great study on the Mississippi Delta with more fact than fiction.

If you have read Bilbo's racist tract, and if you know much about what he did while Governor of Mississippi, then it's very clear that this book is a stratetic attempt at whitewashing Bilbo. To take one example, Morgan says that Bilbo's reputation outside the south "was almost totally molded by a universally hostile Mississippi press" (57). Um, no. For one thing, just how would the outside world be influenced by the Mississippi press? More important, his reputation was hurt by what he said and did--like his obsession with sending all African-Americans back to Africa.

(What he says about the Nazis, and who he cites in his book, are enough to damage any reputation, especially since his book came out after the war--and if you really want to see why he had the reputation he did, just look at his Senate speeches.)

The book is good on the things that Bilbo did to try to help poor whites, and it is thorough on showing his strong support for the New Deal (and, as it turns out, that's Morgan's single criterion for assigning the term "liberal"). But it's really bad when it comes to race (even to the point of mis-summarizing Chafe's book on southern civility).

It's too bad that the book is alternately offensive and embarassing any time the topic of race comes up, because a really good book that talked about why there were so many racist liberals in the thirties and forties (Coughlin, Long) would be really interesting. This isn't that book.

Who knew there was more to Mississppi Senator Theodore Bilbo then his racist tract "Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization"? In what would certainly give liberals fits, this book proves that Bilbo was much more then a southern racist. He was, in fact, one of the biggest supporters of FDR's New Deal in the entire country. Even when the rest of the southern Senators turned on FDR, Bilbo stayed loyal. Bilbo supported every piece of New Deal legislation except one. Not bad for a "hater". While the book is sparse in personal detail, it makes up for it with extremely detailed accounts of the political battles Bilbo fought. He chased Huey Long out of Mississippi politics and held his own against hostile forces within his own sphere of influence. It helps to know something about 1930's politics before you read this book. Can you tell I liked it?

Henry Peter Bosse's exquisite photographs of the Upper Mississippi River, taken between 1883 and 1893, are little known today owing to their great scarcity. Fewer than two hundred of his images have ever reached the open market, and there has yet to be a major museum exhibition of his work. Despite this, Bosse's large cyanotypes currently sell in the twenty thousand dollar range and are much sought after by museums and discerning photo collectors. A first rate book on his career and images has been needed for over a decade.

Sadly, that need has yet to be fulfilled. Mark Neuzil's decidedly poor offering contributes only badly reproduced photographs and a text that, while eminently readable, is overshadowed by glaring inaccuracies.

Early on, Neuzil opines that Bosse "...was tutored in Greek and Latin and completed classical studies at Magdeburg (Germany) where he added courses in engineering and art..." (pg.7). But in the next sentence he notes, "There was no university at Magdeburg at the time...", and cites a sole obituary as a basis for his "facts" regarding Bosse's education. Since Neuzil also notes that there are no known historical documents pertaining to Bosse prior to his arrival in the U.S. this attribution seems something of a stretch.

On the next page he names Montgomery Meigs, U.S. Civil Engineer, as a possible photography tutor to Bosse, citing Meigs' experience with a camera and his own cyanotypes. A little rudimentary research on the author's part would have revealed that all of Meigs' known photos date from AFTER 1893, by which time Bosse had apparently stopped taking pictures.

Two paragraphs on, Neuzil emphatically states that, "In the floating office that was the BARNARD (a Corps riverboat) Bosse possibly enjoyed the company of Mark Twain...(because)...Some of the author's river travel in 1882 came via the BARNARD, ...captained...by a friend of Twain's."

This must come as a huge surprise to Twain scholars. The author's 1882 Mississippi River trip was fully chronicled by the popular press of the day and neither they nor any Twain historian since ever stumbled across this piece of information. Neuzil offers no source for the tidbit, and actually can't do so - for the simple reason that it never happened!

The author also claims that in 1878 Bosse began work for the Rock Island Engineer Office, "...where he was employed as chief draftsman until his death in 1903." However, Mary Forresta's introduction to Neuzil's book states (correctly) that F.S. Eastman was chief draftsman at Rock Island when Bosse arrived. Indeed, Bosse only achieved that position after Eastman left the job some years later.

An author's perceived veracity is of paramount interest to the reader, particularly when that author is writing history or offering himself as an expert on the subject at hand. The errors mentioned here occur IN THE FIRST TEN PAGES and only the need for brevity prohibits pointing to more. Add to the mix a collection of images that, while fascinating, are still bland and tepid versions of Bosse's originals and you have VIEWS ON THE MISSISSIPPI.

That said, buy it anyway. Henry Bosse's photographs deserve far wider circulation than they have achieved, which is a pity. His images offer us an intimate glimpse of Mark Twain's Mississippi River, up close and personal - or at least closer than anyone else of the period. If you enjoy Mark Twain and/or the Mississippi you'll enjoy Bosse's photos - but take the attached history with substantially more than a pinch of salt. Actually, take it with a great honkin' truck load.

Mike Conner

Mark Neuzil and Merry Foresta have brought back to life with this book a Mississippi River that has long since disappeared below the brackish water of the Big Muddy. Henry Peter Bosse captured on film the Mississippi River that Mark Twain navigated as a river boat captain, the Mormans had to traverse leaving Nauvoo, IL for points west and that Lewis and Clark travelled on the way to the west coast. He did this at a time just before it disappeared below the backwaters of today's lock and dam system. Bosse's photographs, while valued at over $1,000,000 are priceless to those of us that have looked out over the river as it exists today and wondered "What lies below the surface of that water?" or "What did the river look like before the lock and dams were built"
If you have ever lived on or loved "The River" this book is a must buy!

I recently carried this book along for a driving trip (carrying bicycles) that my daughter and I took down the Southern Atlantic coast (NC, SC, GA), veering to north central Florida before turning around for home. The book was ok, but only for pointing us in a general direction and then mapping out our own rides from there. The maps are relatively easy to follow and they do a good job categorizing the type of rides from Rambles up to Challenges, but I found myself wanting more 'challenge' on the Cruises and Rambles and less 'challenge' for the Classics and Challenges. Perhaps it's just a matter of personal preference.

Our first stop was Jekyll Island, GA. We were not too pleased to learn that the Jekyll Island Ramble, noted as "an excellent bike ride for the entire family", was in reality a highly dangerous path (~3 ft. wide) shared with other cyclists and pedestrians coming and going from both directions. Was appalled to read the island maps and literature strongly suggesting that cyclists stay off the real roads and on these hazardous paths. My daughter and I ignored that suggestion for the most part, but still had to navigate around a few cyclists riding on the left side of the road so to stay with their riding partners who had opted to stay on the path. I understand why some people might prefer or be attracted to bicycle paths. However, I think that ALL bicycle riders would do well to understand that the basic rules of cycling are pretty much the same as the rules of the road for drivers. IMO, if people would ride with this awareness, there would be very little need to sequester cyclists (or cyclists to sequester themselves) onto choked and dangerous little paths with pedestrians as is the case on Jekyll Island. The marsh and harbor side of the island was very quiet and sparsely traveled as compared to the ocean/beach side. We did follow the bike path for a bit because it veered away from the road and was very scenic.

Our next stop was St. Augustine, FL. Car traffic along A1A was far too heavy and the streets way too narrow to even attempt the St. Augustine Ramble - my 12 year old is a good road rider, but easily overwhelmed. To sandwich her between all those cars would have been cruel and unthinkable. We did walk down St. Georges Street, but I can't imagine attempting to cycle through all that pedestrian traffic as the book suggests. I was tempted to snatch a few of the children on scooters and scold them for weaving in and out so closely among the walkers - what the heck were their parents thinking, or were they thinking??

On to North Central Florida, location of the Suwannee River Classic ride. No way was my short-legged 12 year old going to ride 98 miles, but to our good fortune, most of the country roads in that area were lightly trafficked by motor vehicles so that we were able to tailor our riding distances accordingly. Falling Creek Falls was a very lovely and scenic stop and not one that would normally be found by most tourists. I wished that the book had highlighted more of the gorgeous fresh water springs in that area and/or mapped some rides to them. The one listed, Ichetucknee Springs, was a pretty place, but not particularly bicycle friendly. People might do well to pick up the Bicycle Facilities Map for North Central Florida at any of the tourism offices - I thought it listed a better and more extensive range of rides and intend to return one day to explore them more thoroghly.

We wound up back on the NC coast to finish off our vacation. By then it was the weekend. I would NOT suggest doing the Cape Fear Challenge ride on a weekend day, even to my worst enemy. I'm not sure when would be the best time to do a ride like this. 421S on the front end of this trip is always car-packed. One must also watch out for hwy 133N on the backside. On Saturdays and Sundays, this is a 2 lane road with NO shoulders heavily trafficked by pickup trucks and SUVs towing big boats on trailers. An early morning weekday jaunt down 133N to Orton Plantation and the Brunswick Historic Site might be quite pleasant, however. Do remember your bug spray as the book suggests! The biting flies and 'no-see-umms' are already thick as of this posting - late April. We stayed in Southport and this area is close to 'home' territory to me. We didn't attempt the Cape Fear Challenge, tho I ran into two cylists who had tried unsuccessfully to cyle out 133N and back. I rode Bald Head Island (all golf-carts, no cars) with my daughter on Saturday and then took a lone early Sunday morning jaunt from Southport to Oak Island - very pleasant!

To sum it up, this is not the worst book of rides, but not the best either. I do appreciate that the book was helpful in providing a little direction for us to head towards, even though we tailored and altered most of the listed rides to suit our own riding style and abilities.