February Review Roundup: FABruary Features

Our fabulous authors have been featured in nearly 100 reviews and articles this month. Take a look at just a few highlights below!

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Unwind spotlighted two of our recent cookbooks.

The magazine recommended Mango by Jen Karetnick “for all those that love this sweet, tropical fruit–or are overwhelmed by a ripe tree in their yard” and deemed it “the definitive mango cookbook.”

In praise of Good Catch: Recipes and Stories Celebrating the Best of Florida’s Waters by Pam Brandon, Katie Farmand, and Heather McPherson, the magazine described the trios’s second book as “a fantastic guide to seasonal eating in our Florida waterways.” The review goes on to congratulate the book that’s “brimming will beautiful photos, delicious recipes, and stories straight from the fisherman bringing you their daily haul.”

Good Catch also reeled in attention from the Chicago Tribune, which called it as a “delicious and warm introduction to the ‘hard-working farmers of the sea’ as well as the state’s fish and bounty.”

“Not all the recipes rely on fish,” the review stresses. “There’s a Key lime mousse, green olive salsa verde and quite a few beverages, including a Papa Doble and sundowner punch….Beyond the recipes and personalities, the book offers tips (‘How to Crack a Stone Crab Claw’) and resources as helpful to a traveler as they are to a cook.”

“If you’ve fished off Florida’s coast” or even dined at some of Florida’s famous oyster and lobster restaurants, “you’ll relish Good Catch,” the review says.

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In case you wanted to catch your own fish for the recipes you’ll learn from Good Catch, look no further than Jan S. Maizler’s Fishing for Spotted Seatrout.

The Venturing Angler says Maizler’s book “perfectly fills a void in fishing books.”

The book “ought to please many anglers in search of information on seatrout fishing,” the review continues. “In every aspect, if you are interested in getting into seatrout, this is your book.”

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If fishing just isn’t for you, sightseeing might pique your interest. Laura Albritton’s Miami for Families: A Vacation Guide for Parents and Kids, is featured in American Reference Books Annual. “With a well-organized layout of the information, and with the volume the perfect size to fit into a carry bag for consulting while on the go in the Miami area, this work will be useful in collections of all types, especially those supporting questions on travel, regionalism, cities, and children and family activities.”

Albritton also contributed to the Authentic Florida blog this past month to talk about Miami’s South Beach. She announces her new blog, Island Runaways, which features a wealth of information about traveling to various islands, plus some fun recipes.

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The Weekly Standard highlighted two of our recent books on Florida state issues.

Going Ape: Florida’s Battles over Evolution in the Classroom by Brandon Haught is “a meticulous account of the 90-year debate…full of high drama and raw emotion,” the magazine notes.

“Going Ape is populated by dozens upon dozens of passionate culture warriors on both sides of the diverse issue. But unless you are a dedicated student of this strand of intellectual history, or a longtime resident of Florida’s Gulf Coast counties around Tampa, you are unlikely to have heard of a single one of them,” the review says.

The magazine also reviewed Matthew T. Corrigan’s Conservative Hurricane: How Jeb Bush Remade Florida, deeming the work “timely and insightful.” The book suggests that “if Jeb Bush were to be elected president, he would be a force to be reckoned with,” the review concludes.

Conservative Hurricane also featured in a New Yorker article about Jeb Bush. “Corrigan writes that Bush’s reforms were ‘long lasting and important,'” the article notes, going on to evaluate Corrigan’s argument that “far from adopting the centrist template used by Mitt Romney and other moderate G.O.P. governors, Bush was a conservative whirlwind.”

Now seen as a leading expert in Jeb Bush’s politics, Corrigan has been cited in various periodicals, including Politico, in which he is credited for his evaluation of Bush “as the most powerful governor in Florida history.” In a CNN article, Corrigan asks “‘Is there enough space in our media environment in the Republican primaries for people to listen to [Bush’s] entire record?'”

While Bush’s run for presidency is still up in the air, it is clear that Corrigan’s book continues to provide insight into the type of president Jeb Bush might become.

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A few of our recent award-winning titles received praise from the Journal of American History:

Winner of the South Carolina Historical Society’s George C. Rogers Jr. Book Award, Stinking Stones and Rocks of Gold: Phosphate, Fertilizer, and Industrialization in Postbellum South Carolina by Shepherd McKinley is deemed “a solid contribution” by the Journal of American History. 

“McKinley argues that despite considerable similarities between Old and New South, the negotiations that produced this resemblance reveal the agency of freedpeople as well as planters, the mingled self-interest and aspirations of politicians, and a new commercial and manufacturing class that relied on old networks and ways of doing business.”

The journal praises Cherisse Jones-Branch’s Crossing the Line: Women’s Interracial Activism in South Carolina during and after World War II, winner of the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award from the Association of Black Women Historians, for “sketch[ing] an intricate dance that weaves individual and organizational efforts to tentatively bridge the racial divide at midcentury.” Jones-Branch “utilizes the personal papers, memoirs, oral histories, and institutional records of scores of South Carolinians and of a variety of organizations to bring disparate stories of interracial activities together. By tracing the long trajectory of women’s activism in the state, Jones-Branch shows the fits and starts, limitations, digressions, and accomplishments of female interracial activism.”

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On the subject of civil rights, Lindsey R. Swindall was interviewed by the African American Intellectual History Society about her book The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 1937–1955.

The AAIHS highlights the book’s success in “illuminatingly cover[ing] the Southern Negro Youth Congress and the Council on African Affairs, two very important organizations in U.S. history but very much understudied” and notes that the book “adds to the scholarship on the long civil rights movement and the globalization of African American history.”

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Lastly, the Civil War Book Review highlighted three of our recent Civil War titles:

“One of the first major transnational studies of the South’s memory of the Civil War,” Uncommonly Savage: Civil War and Remembrance in Spain and the United States by Paul D. Escott “displays a sure command of its history,” the review notes.

“Uncommonly Savage is an intellectual tour de force…[that] presents a compelling…interpretation of what happens in the South after the Civil War,” the review continues. It is “uncommonly learned, thoughtful and provocative.”

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William B. Lees and Frederick P. Gaske’s Recalling Deeds Immortal: Florida Monuments to the Civil War, is heralded in the Civil War Book Review as a “treasure trove of information.”

“Recalling Deeds Immortal measures the potential and limits of Union commemoration in the deep South,” the reviewer notes, going on to call the book “a welcome resource for scholars of Civil War memory as well as visitors to the Florida monuments that Lees and Gaske so meticulously profile.”

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In Thunder on the River: The Civil War in Northeast Florida, Daniel L. Schafer “brings a lifetime of research to [a] well-written, fast-paced narrative,” the Civil War Book Review notes. “Schafer’s study of the Civil War in Northeast Florida adds immensely to these regional studies.”

“Schafer vividly portrays the life, death, and destruction as Union troops invaded and occupied Jacksonville four times,” the review continues. “Schafer’s combining of previously untapped manuscript and newspaper sources in local and far-away archives furnished him an extraordinary opportunity to draw a vivid, riveting picture that war visited on the region.”