Less than a week after Hurricane Gustav kept many of us watching The Weather Channel, hoping New Orleans would be spared a repeat of the flooding damage brought by Hurricane Katrina, those of us in North Carolina are now watching as Tropical Storm Hanna is taking aim at the Carolina coastline.

Many of us here at the UNC Press have either friends or family who live along the North Carolina coastline. As such, this time of the year makes most of us a bit uneasy as we go about our days, hoping for the best. When a storm system like Hanna starts to form, we start paying attention to it early on. We’re all hoping that the storm will stay safely well out at sea.
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In some ways it seems difficult to believe that it was only a week ago that the Democratic Convention was taking place. Since then we’ve had a major hurricane seriously threaten New Orleans and the entire Gulf region, a second hurricane forming (one that’s taking aim at our own Carolina coastline) and the start of the Republican Convention.

With the start of the Republican Convention in St. Paul it’s meant the start of another week of late-night television viewing in our house. As with last week we’re continuing with our preference for commentator-less coverage on C-SPAN and I’m happy to report that our ability to understand what we’ve heard and draw our own conclusions from the speaker’s words is still going strong. (If you don’t already to so, I really recommend you try it sometime.)

Politically, this week’s news has been centered on the 11th Governor of the State of Alaska, Sarah Palin. As the first female Vice Presidential nominee in over twenty-five years, and the first such candidate for the Republican Party, Palin has had a great deal of attention paid to both her and her family. Judging (for myself) from the reactions of many of the the Republican women in the convention hall last night during her acceptance speech, she already has a great many fans among the Party Faithful.
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Our adoration and appreciation with WUNC’s “The State of Things” continues to grow on an almost weekly basis. Today, for instance, host Frank Stasio interviewed Anna Hayes on her new biography of Susie Marshall Sharp.

Hayes’ book, “Without Precedent: The Life and Times of Susie Marshall Sharp” looks at the life of the first woman judge in the state of North Carolina and the first woman in the United States to be elected chief justice of a state supreme court. When Susie Marshall Sharp retired in 1979 she left a legacy any judge would be proud to leave. Not only did she break new ground for women in the legal profession but she was known as a tireless proponent for lucidity in the law, honesty in judges, and humane conditions in prisons.

The book captures both the professional and the somewhat surprising personal life of Judge Sharp. Early reviews by colleagues and friends call the book “honestly written,” “well-documented,” and “deserv[ing of] a wide audience–not only among students of the state, but anyone interested in the life of a woman who succeeded in a male world.”

– Tom

When Hurricane Katrina moved northwest through the Gulf of Mexico, hitting the Gulf Coast of the US in late August of 2005 I had only the briefest of connections to the city: my parents had attended a convention there in the late 60s, a friend I had grown up with lived there with his wife right after graduating from the seminary, and a former co-worker had grown up there. Otherwise, I knew it only as “The City Below Sea Level”, the home of Mardi Gras and cajun/creole cooking. And Dixieland Jazz.

After the levees had failed and the enormity of the situation became inescapable to any caring, thinking human, I became one of the people who, along with my wife, spent our evenings watching the situation grow from bad to worse to something beyond worse. It wasn’t so much the flooding that shocked and saddened me, that was almost an inevitable event. What astounded me was the inaction of the government to assist fellow Americans in their greatest hours of need.

As those hours stretched into days and into weeks my feelings of sadness and anger turned to a desire to do something. Exactly what, I didn’t know. I wasn’t able to go to New Orleans to volunteer for various reasons and I doubted the notion of donating money as a ‘real’ solution. In the days after September 11, 2001 we were all said to have become New Yorkers. In the days after August 29, 2005 it was becoming clear there might not be much of a New Orleans for the country to belong to.
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Perhaps you’ve noticed there’s been some politicking going on lately? It may have been too subtle for you to have noticed, especially if you live somewhere without radio, television or internet access (although, come to think of it, that would make reading this blog a bit difficult), but, indeed, it’s been going on for months (and months and months).

But the past, as they say, is prologue. Now is the time to finally Get Serious about your politics. Yes, it’s time for another election cycle to get kicked into high gear again with funny hats, waving signs and a seemingly endless supply of speakers in a well-choreographed procession of rhetoric — the Political Conventions!

The first round of the festivities concludes tonight in Denver where the Democratic Party finishes off its Convention Week with Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. Obama will be speaking before an estimated crowd of 75,000 people who want to see this piece of history being made.

My wife and I typically fit pretty comfortably into the category of “Political Junkie” and, as a result, we’ve spent most of our evenings this week watching the convention on C-SPAN, preferring the uninterrupted gavel-to-gavel coverage to the occasional big-name speaker and lots of commentary mixed in between. Being people of reasonable intelligence, we’re quite able to understand and assess what we heard each of the speakers say, thankyouverymuch.
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We have more than our share of serious baseball fans here at the UNC Press. Personally, I grew up a Washington Senators fan who turned his allegiances to the Baltimore Orioles after the Senators left town in the 1971. Our Associate Director here at the Press is also an Orioles fan as well as a fan of our own UNC Men’s Baseball team.

The area’s best-known team, however, is the Durham Bulls, our local AAA affiliate of the Tampa Bay Rays. The Bulls’ home field is a beautiful baseball park (modeled, incidentally, after the Orioles’ Camden Yards) and a great place to see a game.

On Thursday, August 28th, the Durham Bulls, along with the downtown Durham Post Office, are hosting a dedication ceremony for the new “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” stamp recently released by the US Postal Service. The stamp commemorates the Jack Norworth seventh inning stretch baseball game classic song written 100 years ago.

The guest roster at the ceremony includes acting Durham Postmaster Tom Pollard, Bulls mascot Wool E. Bull, and Clay Council, an All-Star Home Run Derby batting practice pitcher who is a mere 71 years young.
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Yet another entry in our continuing series of “Why We Love WUNC Radio’s ‘The State of Things’”

Glenda Gilmore is an eighth-generation North Carolinian who grew up in Greensboro during the 1960s. It wasn’t until she was teaching American History in a predominantly black school in South Carolina that she realized how her view of history had be skewed by white supremacy ideology. This forced her to rethink much of what she had learned and accepted as fact over the years.

Gilmore has received degrees from Wake Forest, UNC-Charolotte and UNC-Chapel Hill. While working on her PhD at UNC-Chapel Hill she did the foundation of the work that became her 1996 title with the UNC Press, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920. The book was very well received, winning five major awards including three from the prestigious Organization of American Historians.

Gilmore is currently the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University and just today sat down with Frank Stasio at WUNC radio for and interview on Stasio’s ‘The State of Things.’

You can listen to the interview at The State of Things Archive page and through this link.

– Tom

As an editor at UNC Press, my professional rhythms are mostly dictated by the academic calendar. So with colleges and most public school systems in North Carolina quickly getting back to business, I often have to remind myself that summer is still going strong. And the great news for those of you who aren’t bound to the school year–and even those who are–is that our state’s fabulous beaches have a lot more open space in this stretch of the year between mid-August and mid-September. So with Glenn Morris’s terrific guide, North Carolina Beaches, in hand, no time like the present for you to join me in a quick flight down I-40, U.S. 70, or U.S. 64 to your favorite spot for sand and surf.

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Last night I had a problem many can relate to—all I wanted was something CHOCOLATE. Seeing as how I was too tired to run to the store for a sweet tooth fix or even try and attempt something overly complicated at home, I turned to Mama Dip’s Family Cookbook to see if there was something simple yet delectable to get me through.

As I flipped through the pages, I found an interesting recipe that caught my eye—“Baked Fudge.” The best part about it? I had all the ingredients right there in my kitchen. Butter, sugar, eggs, milk, vanilla, flour, a pinch of salt and two unsweetened chocolate baking squares are all it called for and took about 10 minutes to prepare. Twenty minutes in the oven and then you have a delicious cross between a warm gooey brownie and a piece of homemade fudge that is impossible to resist!

For someone who finds cooking slightly difficult and frustrating at times, Mama Dip’s Family Cook Book provides recipes that are simple and clear…yet still taste like you were sitting right there at Mama Dip’s restaurant enjoying her southern sweets.

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As a publisher based in the Triangle area of North Carolina (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill) we are proud to have a very good working relationship with our local book sellers. An area’s local book sellers are a treasure chest of not only books, but staff who know their titles, authors and subjects. Need a recommendation? Ask someone on the staff of a local, independent book seller and you’re not only likely to get a longer than expected list, but you’ll get it with the enthusiasm and drive of someone who loves books as much as you do.

The Triangle is home to some fantastic independent book stores. Our friends over at WUNC’s “State of Things” recognize this as well. Last week host Frank Stasio interviewed Nancy Olson, founder and owner of Quail Ridge Books and Music in Raleigh.

Just how good is Quail Ridge Books and Music? Good enough to win the 2001 Publisher’s Weekly Bookseller of the Year Award the PW award given to the best book seller in the entire USA.

Stasio spoke with Nancy about her career as a book store owner and her experiences with authors over the years. It’s an enjoyable, insightful interview, regardless of where you live. You can five it a listen at the “State of Things” archive page for “Meet Nancy Olson.”

– Tom