Rammer Jammer Yellowhammer
Sep 20, 2005
A Journey into the Heart of Fan Mania
By Warren St. John
IBSN# 0609607081
Crown Publishers, 2004
College football in the south is a religion. Growing up in Alabama, I didn’t know a single person who didn’t have a favorite SEC team. In my neck of the woods it was either Alabama or Auburn and Heaven forbid you didn't take sides. You’d occasionally see a Vols fan or a Gator fan on I-65, but mostly my world was made up of Crimson Tide football.
But I never stopped to think that there was a whole other world outside of college football. I knew I was a Bama fan because my family was made up of Bama fans. I inherited the legacy, so to speak. I knew that Auburn and Tennessee were the enemies. I knew that wearing crimson and white was an honor. But I never stopped to think why.
Why are people fanatic over sports? What is the fascination? Why do they buy RV’s the size of a double-wide trailer just to go sit in a asphalt parking lot, two, or even three, days before the game starts? Why do they pick up and head off to the next football game in another state just to tailgate all over again in the next few days? Why do they grab the nearest stranger and bear hug him when their team makes a winning play? Why do southerners take such pride in their college teams?
New York Times reporter, Warren St. John asked himself that too and decided to find out.
Rammer Jammer Yellowhammer is an account of St. John’s foray into the lives of a RV society. His book isn’t just about the tailgaters and why they are at the game, so to speak, but rather about why someone can love a team so much that they will spent tons of money getting to one, miss important events (such as a daughter’s wedding), or show such a devotion to one team that they are buried in a casket decorated in their team’s colors and logos.
The fun starts as Birmingham-born St. John meets up with fellow Bama fans, Chris and Paula Bice, as a guest in their motor home for the first Bama game of the season. The Bices open his eyes to the ultimate tailgate party, complete with Bama Bombs (maraschino cherries marinated in Pure Grain Alcohol) and Van Tiffens (the PGA cherry juice in Sprite).
At each game, St. John meets more Alabama fans and gives us a look into their weekend lives. Each RV family has a special recipe of sorts that they share with him: baloney sticks, assorted alcoholic drinks, spicy pickled tomatoes, and barbecue, to name a few. Each reveals a little about themselves and show that they aren’t so different from you and me. They just have a passion for southern football and they aren't afraid to show it.
At the Alabama-Florida game, he settles down in the Alachua Campground and writes:
"The Alachua campground is a scenic little bog beneath a canopy of moss-covered pines not far from the highway. A hundred and seventy-five Alabama RV’s have overrun the place along with a smattering of deeply confused Canadians – snowbirds who’d never thought to check the American college football schedule before choosing their RV campground….
"In the lot the usual laid-back Friday afternoon scene of beer drinkers in folding chairs has been displaced by a flurry of activity…I spot RV’s I recognize: Donnie, Skipper, and Bill Prescott are all parked together in the back of the bog. I run into Frances and get my ticket. Jerral Johnson, the Show Chicken Man, is standing over a grill that leaks wisps of smoke…Johnson offers me dinner – potato salad, iced tea, and a succulent filet mignon, which he has slow-cooked in tin-foil…"
Warren St. John gives us a look into a subculture that has never really been exposed before. By purchasing his own RV, dubbed The Hawg, he drives from game to game, and finally to the SEC Championship game in Atlanta. Does he find out the answers to the questions that drove him there in the first place? The reader makes up his/her own mind after reading this book. There is no neat little ending, just a pang that football season is over and you have to wait another year to cheer like a banshee for your favorite team.
"...Rammer Jammer Yellowhammer is not only a travel story, but a cultural anthropology of fans that goes a long way toward demystifying the universal urge to take sides and win."
Reviewed by Dana Sieben
www.southerngalgoesnorth.blogspot.com
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Warren St. John, the author has a link for book clubs, if interested:
http://www.rammerjammeryellowhammer.com/bookclubs.htm
"We believe that book club gatherings about Rammer Jammer should be as much fun as the book itself. You get the barbecue, and we’ll supply a jar of Bama Bombs, a reader’s guide and a selection of recommended articles on the research on understanding the phenomenon of sports fans. We'll even forward the mixing instructions for a batch of Pink Panty Pulldowns, though we take no responsibility for any misbehavior that occurs afterwards. If circumstances allow, Warren is happy to join your book club by speaker phone for half an hour."
Dead as a Doornail
Sep 16, 2005
Reviewed by AKA: Meritt
http://coffeetalking.blogspot.com/
Publisher: Ace/Penguin Putnam
Publication Date: May 2005
For those of you familiar with the name Sookie Stackhouse, you must have picked up a book by Charlaine Harris at some point over the last 2 years. The 'lightweight' writing style isn't one to be discussed in serious book clubs, but if you are a fan of vampire stories of any kind and you are not too picky, it has a following.
Two years ago I picked up "Dead Until Dark" and met the Louisiana Barmaid named Sookie Stackhouse. She lives in a world where vampires have 'come out of the closet' and while not completely accepted in our world, they are not a hidden underground anymore. Sookie is a typical Southern girl with all the charm, wit and grace to be expected of a Southern Belle, except for one tiny plus; she has the gift of telepathy.Still, she manages a nice quiet life until Bill, a vampire walks into her bar and into her life. This started the 'Sookie' series that surprisingly continued with more than just one short lived and sorry-written book.
Because the first was so bad, I could only recommend it as very very 'light' reading for someone who needed a lightening quick read, or maybe fodder for a plane ride or a beach vacation. If you lost the book or left it at the airport you might not even notice it was gone for a week or two.
However! Almost two years later, being desperate for reading material and having a Coffeekid waiting for me in the Land Rover while I 'ran into the library really quick' I grabbed the first three books that looked remotely readable. One of Charlaine Harris's latest books in the series was standing up at attention on an end cap calling to me, so I answered.
I picked up Dead As A Doornail.In the last couple years she's managed to take Sookie through a few more vampire and werewolf friends with Living Dead in Dallas, Club Dead and Dead to the World, all of which I have not read. I'm very happy to note her writing has improved with these books and Dead as a Doornail was a good read. Still light and quick, it's not for pondering over or discussing in your local coffeehouse, but for a quick, fast paced light vampire mystery story it's worth your time.
In this latest (of five) Sookie-adventures, her brother Jason has just become a were-panther. At the same time someone is picking off the local shapeshifters with a shotgun and of course Sookie gets caught up in that as well as being woo'ed by numerous male suitors, none of which are human, being interviewed by detectives for yet another death that she did, indeed cause, keeping up with a couple past vampire boyfriends, and trying to stay alive while someone is trying to kill her by fire and bullets. Going from one mishap to another she is finally an unwilling spectator (and human lie detector) at her friend Alcide Herveaux's father's bid for leader of the local were-pack.
If you like heavier reading I'd go for one of the Anita Blake Vampire series books, but for the light, witty and humorous reading that we all need in our lives once in a while I can recommend Dead As a Doornail as a great vampire mystery read. Charlaine Harris has come quite far in her writing abilities since the first installment.
Dead Until Dark
Living Dead in Dallas
Widow of the South
Sep 15, 2005
Reviewed by Cowtown Pattie
http://texastrifles.blogspot.com/
"Franklin is the blackest page in the history of the War of the Lost Cause. It was the bloodiest battle of modern times in any war. It was the finishing stroke to the Independence of the Southern Confederacy. I was there. I saw it." --Sam Watkins, 1st Tennessee Infantry
During this past week amid all the horrors and wreckage that Katrina wrought upon my neighbors in the south, I have been immersed in reading about another time of devastation and one more sinister because it was of human design and not the almighty wrath of Mother Nature at her fiercest. Written by Robert Hicks and published by Time Warner Books, The Widow of the South, is a fascinating story about a different sort of southern heroine, Carrie McGavock, and her long dedication to "her boys" - Confederate casualties of the 1864 battle of Franklin, Tennessee. Hicks pays a beautiful and artful tribute to this unique woman, a story of courage, sacrifice and love. Not your typical romance novel at all, this book is a rich accounting of a real-life Steel Magnolia. While paying close attention to historical detail, Hicks manages to weave complicated characters and several subplots into one delicious read. This book reminded me of a novel I read years ago, True Women written by Janice Woods Windle. That story takes place just after the Civil War in Texas and chronicles the lives of some feisty and amazing Texas women. Like the tough and resilient women depicted in True Women, Carrie McGavock is no lightweight, no swooning Aunt Pittipat.
The small town of Franklin, Tennessee had been a Union military post since the fall of Nashville in early 1862. Confederate President Jefferson Davis had replaced commander Joseph E. Johnston with John Bell Hood in late summer of 1864. With an objective to drive Sherman away from Atlanta and Robert E. Lee's forces, Hood began to plan his Tennessee Campaign of 1864. On the afternoon of November 30th, 1864, the citizens of Franklin witnessed one of the bloodiest battles of the war. Later it would be called, "The Gettysburg of the West". (This is a very good description of the battle.)
After 5 hours of brutal combat, the fields lay bloodied with 9200 dead and injured soldiers, an overwhelming responsibility to the 2500 citizens of Franklin.
The Confederate dead lay on one side of the entrenchments, the Union dead on the other, and, in the night, the living Union troops quietly left town. They left town even as the Confederate commander planned his morning attack. A number of Confederates wandered the field looking futively for their friends, taking in the full extent of the horror that lay at their feet. It was only then, later in the cold night, that they noticed the silence. It was not total silence; there were still the moans and pleading of the dying in the air. But the aggressive sort of noise that had throttled their ears for near five hours - from the hour before twilight into the moonless night, the gunshots, the report of cannons - that noise had dissipated to nothing.
The stately planatation home of the McGavock family was suddenly spilling over with war-torn bodies and pitiful cries of pain and suffering at every step. Try as I might, I couldn't help but envision Gone With The Wind, particularly the scene where Scarlett is working less than wholeheartedly in a makeshift hospital at the train depot in Atlanta; the malnourished raggedy men of the Confederacy in their bloody rags and musket-blown limbs begging her for water and morphine. But, unlike Scarlett, Carrie McGavock throws herself fully into the care and nursing of these wounded men. She is not the simple contrivance of Southern Belle turned scrappy survivor that Scarlett represented; moreover, the character of Carrie is complicated, layered and not so easily niched. Long suffering the loss of three of her five children, Carrie had become a depressed emotionless cripple until the battle of Franklin brought both death and a renewed life to her doorstep.
Zachariah Cashwell, a hardscrabble dirt farmer from Arkansas, is among the wounded seeking refuge at Carnton Plantation. While this character is ficticious, Hicks embodies him with both dignity and grit, a good vehicle for seeing the war through a soldier's eyes. No swashbuckling Rhett here, Cashwell has lost a leg during the battle and the years of war have not been kind. Nonetheless, Carrie and Zachariah are drawn to one another, soulmates defying the almost palpable class lines between the genteel plantation wife and the crass Arkansas farmer.
When the shallow graves of the Confederate soldiers fall into danger of being plowed under, Carrie takes on the task of removal and reburial of nearly 1500 graves. The little private cemetery becomes her passion and her found mission in life. With the aide of her former slave, the mystical Mariah, Carrie journals her own personal book of the dead; she forces Mariah to speak aloud her "visions of the dead" so that she might better come to know each fallen soldier and his prewar life:
"Mariah wasn't sure that what she saw in her mind was real, just the product of a fevered imagination, or maybe the work of the devil himself making her play games with the white woman whom she loved in a way she could not describe. Fragments of light and sound came to her when she let her mind drift, and the words Carrie craved formed on Mariah's lips unbidden. It was a thoughtless exercise, a pastime to while away an afternoon. The thing she did know, the only thing she knew for sure, was that Carrie believed."
There is no escaping the comparison of The Widow of the South to the other novels that came before it, nor to their subsequent screen adaptations. Like his fellow authors ofGWTW, The Killer Angels ( Gettysburg), and Cold Mountain, Robert Hicks has created a memorable story, one that gives a new facet to the Civil War era woman of the deep south. Hicks himself explained his own reason for writing the story:
"What I strive for is about transformation: how people are transformed by each other, by circumstances, by loss or gain."
He certainly succeeds, and I will be the first in line to see this book come to life on the big screen.
Many thanks to Miriam, at the Time Warner Book Group for suggesting this terrific novel to me.
(Editor's note - an earlier review of Widow of the South was written in August, 2005 and is located at: http://dewbookreviews.blogspot.com/2005/08/widow-of-south.html)
Living Dead in Dallas
Sep 2, 2005
Living Dead in Dallas
(Southern Vampire Mysteries)
by Charlaine Harris
This is the second book in the Southern Vampire series by Charlaine Harris. It continues the adventures of Sookie Stackhouse, a young barmaid in a small rural Louisiana town. Sookie is determined to clear the good name of a local cop, who is a suspect in a local murder.
However; she must first investigate another crime for a "nest" of vampires in Dallas, Texas. Why is a barmaid pressed into this kind of service by vampires? Because she has a certain talent ... telepathy.
She tries to work her way through vampire politics in order to solve crimes, avoid death by an anti-vampire group called "The Fellowship of the Sun", struggle with a maenad, and get help from shape-shifters. I've always said that a southern woman can do anything!
I enjoyed the book; however, I was uncomfortable with a few aspects. I'm not a big reader of romance novels and "Living Dead in Dallas" had a lot of sex. I was also a bit unconfortable with the "Fellowship of the Sun" which came of as an extreme right-wing church. However; it is very hard to pin Charlaine Harris' work into anykind of a category.Her "southern vampire" series is a mystery, thriller, vampire story with romance and comedy.
In short, I enjoyed it and I think that you will too ...
