I read this book years and years ago and it makes me laugh just remembering it! It's one of those books you can never forget and it can give you the giggles from the other side of a decade later! Don't pass this up!

Very funny and appealing, a very entertaining rea

This continues the Club Sunset Island Series by Cherie Bennett. I haven't read all the books about Club Sunset Island but I plan too. I really like this book because Cherie Bennetts characters are easy to relate to. i.e Patti Chernick at first you really really dislike her but when you find out about her home life and see how other people treat her you feel awful for her. It's a really great book.

...I thought it was a really great book...Even though it was writ ten several years ago the book was still intresting. Cherie Bennett is a great writer and all I can say is 'keep on writing Cherie!'

A very touching account of life, by a woman who lived in Atlanta, during the Civil War. The book is historically accurate, but it does reflect the Southern attitude of the period. A very good book for a serious student of Southern History. Not for everyone.

This is a very well written account of Miss Gay's experiences living near Atlanta during the war, specifically 1864-1865. It is a very different account of the war in that it does not review battles or troop movements. It does give an insight into the common Southern attitudes concerning the North, slavery, the War and Sherman. If you "read between the lines", you gain an understanding of prevailing attitudes from many things she does not say. An example of this is her brother whom she writes extensively and very affectionately. What she never plainly states or even casually refers, is that he is a half-brother. Family is extremely important to her and the fact that she does not share the same father with her siblings has no bearing on her affection towards them. Miss Gay was in her mid-thirties during the war. This is an adult civilian perspective of the war between the States.

This is not your average book. Richard Endier is not your average man. A plot of fast-paced action and intrigue takes place in The Spider's Test. The Spider, a fear inspiring awnshegh has focused its terrible gaze upon Richard. Revenge is foremost on its mind. For Richard Endier, the simple farm boy destined for greatness, has tricked, out-witted, and humiliated the Spider again and again. The Spider's main weapon is the fear it inspires, so it cannot a simple farm boy who has tricked it repeatedly live. When Richard creates a frontier settlement near the Spider's domain, the awnshegh sees the perfect opportunity for revenge. With only himself and his friends to protect themselves, the only way Richard can save even himself is by tricking the Spider yet again, this time with the biggest riddle of all.

Another one of the great birthright books. If you like to see the monster win then this book is for you.

Dixie Spirits is a collection of ghost stories from the American south. Some of the stories in this book are hauntings that are very familiar to anyone who likes to read this type of books. The gray man, the Brown Mountain lights, and the Myrtles plantation are found within the pages of this book and just about any book about southern ghosts that one chooses to read. However, there are also some hauntings to be found in this book that I was not familiar with. For example the Sloss Furnaces, the Athens haunted pillar, and the Hornet ghost light. Also, the ghosts of some of the Lee homes in Virginia were completely new to me. I suppose that anyone writing a book of this sort would have to assume that his or her readers hadn't read about the Myrtles and would feel as if they had to include such a famous haunt. I guess that those of us who frequent these books will just have to learn to live with that fact.

The only other problems I found in this book were an over abundance of Indian legends and a last second rush of UFO stories. Coleman tries to explain his use of the UFO tales but I bought a ghost book, not a UFO book and had no real desire to find UFO stories haunting this book's pages. There are also numerous typos, which are somewhat irritating.

On the other hand, the writing style of the author is very pleasing and the stories in this book seem to just fly by. I assume that he has done a fair amount of research but there is no bibliography so I can't be sure. Overall, this is a well-written and interesting book. A little off target in places but still rather good and well worth the price. Read it on a cool October evening but don't get too lost in its pages or the mothman might get you.

Dixie Spirits is a very good collection of well known and not so well known regional ghost stories. Christopher Coleman is a talented writer who tells the tales with a fresh new spin. I particularly appreciated the sympathetic treatment of African Americans and Indians in his version of the classic ghost stories. The best thing about these "true tales" is that you can visit every single place in the book. My only complaint is the way the book abruptly ends. There should have been an author's note or an index.

This was a great book about hauntings in the Southern States. This ranks up there with Katherine Tucker Windham (pardon the spelling) books. I really enjoyed it a lot. Some of the stories in this book are also in others that I have read and they match VERY closely. Get it, read it and you will love it!

It was not the best book I've ever read. It was realistic but not My type at all. It's about a drought which threatens to destroy the Farm and a girl name Dutch is growing up and her cousin comes to visit. I could have picked a better book.

The summer seems neverending to fourteen year old Dutch Peyton. The drought her family is experiencing on their farm is destroying their crops, not to mention destroying their hope for the future. Even though that is more than the Peytons need to worry about, they have some difficult family situations that need to be worked out. Dutch learns a lot that summer, about love, life and family.

I would recommend Dixie Storms to anyone. The setting is vividly described, and the characters are realistic and true to life. Although the plot is somewhat slowly moving, Dixie Storms is still a terrific book.

this book toke me two days to read i9 could not put it down it was the best bookn i ever read i wish barbra hall wrote more books she is the best writier

This memoir is a wonderful panoramic view of America's most glorious tragedy, filled with romance, privation, luxury, and death. This chronicle is a window to a lost world, a world of private lives and great political movements.

Mrs. Chestnut provides us with the small details in the picaresque life of a general's wife. The frustration of a people's hope of self-determination is revealed, as is the revulsion of some Southerners to slavery and its attendant shame.

She shows us her neighbors' private and justified fear of murderous servants, the grand victories of the Confederate armies which mean nothing against an inexhaustible enemy, the intimate drawing room intrigues of upper class Southern debutantes among their friends and wounded heroes.

The traditional icons of Southern Gentility are shown to be less than uniformly admirable, though the perseverence and insight of this writer are heroic, and show the true character of the best of American womanhood.

Any serious student of the War Between the States who has not read this first-person account is not a serious student at all.

This narrative has the rare quality of allowing the reader to view the author's world through their glasses. The reader quickly slips into Mrs Chestnut's value system and truely appreciate the highs and lows of Confederate society, the wealth and hardship, privileges and privations of those who sat hearthside. Additionally, rare personal glimpses insights are provided on some of the movers and shakers of Confederate government, military and society. Such glimpes are delicious and slighly voyeuristic!
A great view, not by a driver in history, but one along for the ride.

I know this may sound crazy, but i am infact the great(times 3) granddaughter of mary boykin chestnut. When my grandfather told me this when i was younger (I am 16 now) I became very interested in learning about her and her husband and in trying to learn more i decided to read the diary in which mary had written. I found it very moving and in some cases disturbing. Before reading her diary ( My grandpap has one of the first copies of it) I could have cared less about the civil war or any war for that matter, but after reading it I gained a new found respect for everything that people in those days had to go through and I think that my grandmother gave people of today a great idea of what the war was like and how people were. I am very proud to say that I am of of the civil wars most influential women.

If you have the courage to test your own intellectual honesty, you'll find great value in Dr. Ray's "Environmental Overkill". As a working environmental scientist, I have over 15 years of practical experience with the regulatory infrastructure, the nature of the problems it attempts to control, and the hopelessly irrelevant (at best) or absolutely destructive (at worst) effects of political environmentalism. If one is willing to concede that the environmentalists' fundamental assertion is true - that technology & economic development cause the environmental problems we face today - the logical conclusion would be that a more conscientious, more responsible, more enlightened, more humane approach to technological and economic development marks the path toward the solutions to those problems.

Dr. Ray exposes the hard truth that the agenda and goals of political environmentalism are antithetical to conscientiousness, responsibility, enlightenment, or humanity. Their agenda and goals are manifest of the most primitive recidivism since the Medieval Inquisition. Dr. Ray's documentation is robust to the point of incontestibility. The easily accessible corroborative proof in her references clearly shows that political environmentalism provides civilizational benefits equivalent to those of witchcraft, only with less emphasis on rationality.[....]That's precisely why Dr. Ray's book is so powerfully irrefutable,[....]a significant percentage of Dr. Ray's references come from a source whose presumed credibility he does not care to challenge: the political environmentalists themselves. The reason why Dr. Ray's book is so devastatingly effective in revealing the fraud of political environmentalism is that she lets its spokespersons destroy their own credibility. She simply quotes their fully documented fraudulent assertions, presents the controverting evidence, and lets the reader reach the overwhelmingly obvious conclusions. Don't take my word for it; read the book and draw your own conclusions.

That is, unless your beliefs about the environment are emotion-based, and you'd prefer not to see that truth.

It's too bad this book is presently out of stock, because it's needed now just as much as when it first came out. In a well-worded, step by step logical fashion, Ms. Ray smashes the demagogues of the environmentalist movement by exposing the facts behind the scare-story headlines that scream that we are destroying the earth and that the only solution to environmental disaster is to return to the horse and buggy days with a dramatically reduced population. An earlier reviewer of this book, jimn469897@aol.com is full of nonsense when he slams the book through association. In checking the hundreds of references Ms Ray includes to back up her assertions, there are only a tiny handfull that come out of the New American or some other politically incorrect magazine. Most of her references are from sources such as CNN, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and a number of professional trade publications and scientific journals. Try to buy this book used. It will be worth the effort.

I read Dr. Ray's books in high school and college to get information for debating. I was surprised to find out that they are among the most heavily footnoted books on the subject of environmentalism. Dr. Ray's use of science and statistical data is so overwhelming that the critics of this book have to resort to political mudslinging to discredit it. If you can find a copy of this or "Trashing the Planet," give it a read. These books are extremely insightful and full of real data that would be hard to compile from other sources.

Superficial and broad-brushed descriptions of some parks, teams, and individuals in the hisory minor league ball in the South and Southwest. Basic research and presentation on some teams/parks was sorely lacking.

From the start, the tile is confusing--when did west Texas and Kansas become a part of Dixie? Was the purpose of this book to inform and entertain baseball fans, or was it to denounce racial injustices from years past? At any rate, the abundant and over-done social commentary and geographical errors of the author had little to do with expectations of a book titled "The Diamonds of Dixie".

Overall, the writing was shallow with trite and only semi-believable accounts of a journey across the South.

Disappointing.

I was visiting a friend and picked up a copy of Diamonds of Dixie and began reading it. I ordered my own copy when I got home. The book is based on a trip in 1993. The author returned to the south,where he was born, and being a baseball fan, spent a summer visiting minor league baseball parks and driving through all 13 southern states. By now many of the ballparks are closed, or changed, or have lost their teams. What remains in the book is a wonderfully observed trip, a qualified tribute to the south of the author's birth, and a picture of minor league baseball as it was in the early 90s. As a woman, I was aware of the limited contributions of women as I read the book, though when he does write of them (Jackie Mitchell, a front office person in Chattanooga) he writes with sensitivity and fairness. As a Texan, I was pleased with the book's treatment of my state. The author's personality carries the book: you want to sit down and have a beer with him and ask even more about the people he met and the places he went. The book is still in print and time hasn't diminished the real quality of the book, a comment on the south's diamonds.

A neat find for me in a used book store. Well written, interesting for even non-baseball fans. Part travel guide, part sociology study and part baseball lore, past and present. Very enjoyable read.

Mr.Applebome, time in The South and Southern wife notwithstanding, is a Yankee, and, therefore, simply cannot help himself; he must toil to make the world go round. As a Southerner and a member of some of the groups at which he looks down that Yankee patrician nose- no, sorry, not the Klan - I know what it is like to spend your life having to be twice as good to be thought half as much of because of a Southern accent - fortunately, it wasn't that difficult. Applebome got it right very early in the book when, quoting Faulkner, he said "you wouldn't understand, you'd have to be born there." He was right, and he doesn't understand.

Through a dozen chapters, Peter Applebome journeys through the modern South, discussing how Southern values have become American values, and how Southern culture has become mainstream. Since the 1960s, the South's politics have come to dominate the nation, and themes that are prominent in the South's daily life have come to be accepted across the country. These themse include individualism, race as a subtext to daily life, religion as part of political life, opposition to gun control, support for the death penalty, liberalism as a dirty word, and states rights as a viable political theory. All of these describe the South, and in the 1990s, they describe the country as well. The region's influence has grown along with its population Applebome looks at all parts of the South, including suburban Cobb County, which he says has defined itself in opposition to Atlanta. Cobb's suburban strip malls are no different than those in any suburban setting in the country. Southern cities like Atlanta and Charlotte are among the nation's business centers. Applebome looks at other parts of the South, examining the state of race relations, the ghosts of labor uprisings, the plight of the rural South, and Southerners' nostalgia for a place that never existed. All in all, Applebome paints an accurate picture of the Modern South, and is generally successful as a journalist in showing that the modern South's contributions to the nation have been both positive and negative. The region has influenced the nation's politics and culture for good and for ill.

Born and raised in New Orleans, I moved North to pursue my career. The culture up here wasn't what I expected, having been indoctrinated that the South had exclusive rights on racism and xenophobia.

But the North is clearly different than the South, especially the Deep South, and I've always had difficulty describing to Yankees just what those differences were and why they were so crucial to understand how Southerners think and why they do what they do. As an example, folks up here often wonder why the South seems so preoccupied with the Civil War; in many Southern hearts, the Civil Rights Movement of the early '60s was a continuation of that war of a century earlier, though in mind they deny such, even to themselves.

While reading this book, I was often startled to see some small observation so well describe my memories growing to a young adult there. In my opinion, Applebome has an excellent eye and is brilliant in his ability to not only discern but describe the little things that make the South what it is. He is able to spotlight what makes so much of its culture attractive to so many Americans, while turning over the rocks to show what lies beneath.

I left the South for reasons besides my career. For whatever cause, I often felt out of step with the prevailing culture. Perhaps I was born a "bleeding-heart Liberal", I've been called a "*** Lover", but for sure my views differed from many of those in my circle of family and friends. So perhaps my opinion of this book is tainted by a Yankee's disdain for the South, though where this Southern Boy got it is unclear.

Applebome seems less to judge than to describe, though some may take issue with his giving voice to certain issues; it's a Southern Tradition that "some things are best not spoken of". Those who dismiss this book as trite or superficial must, I suspect, never have lived in the South. Or they feel obliged to defend it's honor.

I've not recommended, but URGED, the reading of this book to all whom I've met who express an interest in leaving the North to live and work down South. Taking this book to heart, not as a condemnation or criticism, but as a roadmap and perhaps "cultural guidebook", will make their transition far easier with fewer long-remembered missteps.

If you've ever looked at Southern politics or politicians, or anything Southern, and wondered "What the Hell were they THINKING when they did that?", this is the book for you. And if you've heard such a thought expressed, and smiled quietly because it was obvious but hard to explain, this book will take you back home.

-gus