"The Southern Heirloom Garden" is a rich and instructive work.

At the start of the book, William C. Welch and Greg Grant tell us that "gardening is one of the oldest, and richest, of our Southern folk arts."

The authors divide the book into two sections. The first section refreshingly explores French, German, Spanish, Native American, and African-American contributions to Southern gardening.

The Spanish, for instance, intensely developed and utilized small garden spaces, while African-Americans used brightly-colored flowers in the front yard as a sign of welcome.

This section also has a commendable essay on historic garden restoration in the South.

The second section addresses the plants "our ancestors used to build and enrich their gardens."

There are nearly 200 full-color photographs here, along with dozens of rare vintage engravings. While some of the pictures are a bit small, they are still informative.

Southern gardeners and historians will particularly enjoy this fine volume.

This is a really great book. I loved the essays on each plant. Greg Grant is very humorous. This is not just a coffee table book, although the pictures are beautiful. It offers advise and inspiration to those of us who will never have the "Southern Living Landscape" look.

In these days of trying the "Western grass garden" or the "English perennial border" it's particularly refreshing to study a book devoted to plants that happily grow in the Southern humidity and heat. While the opening chapters on historical gardens in the new world (French, Spanish, etc.) were interesting, the later chapters on plants were the most informative. When reading I could hear my Grandmother using the same commonplace names, like "paw-paw" and how to make jelly from the fruit. The challenge will now be to find some of these plants. (The authors admit some plants are only available from old gardens in the South). It remains one of my favorite garden books for its affectionate commentary on one of the oldest southern pastimes - our gardens and the talking and sharing of plants with loved ones.

Think of those old photos of Sioux Indians sitting stone-faced in Venetian gondolas or posing with Queen Victoria. What were those men thinking, warriors who until only very few years before had been riding full-tilt across the plains? In "the Heartsong of Charging Elk," James Welch imagines what it must have been like for a Sioux to travel across Europe with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.

Traveling with the show was pretty fun. Charging Elk and the other young men get to show off their riding skills, chase buffalo again, and shoot up a mock homestead. When they show was over, they went home to the tipis they traveled with - just like they'd done on the plains - joked, gambled, ate, and had a good time. The strange world around them was not much of a marvel or a curiosity, and very few whites made an impression (Queen Victoria was the exception. The Indians all liked her and called her Grandmother England.) Very few spoke any English, let alone French or Italian.

In Marseilles, Charging Elk becomes ill and was taken to the hospital. Wit no idea that arrangements had been made for him to rejoin the show in Rome, he leaves the hospital and disappears into the city.

He might as well be on Mars. He has no idea what people around him are doing. He cannot speak to anyone. The French are as bewildered by him as he is by them. But he knows that what he wants is to go home. Throughout the novel, Welch weaves Charging Elk's Sioux dream life through his days in working-class Marseilles. Will he fall in love? Make friends? Make a home in France, or find his way back to Red Cloud Agency?

Welch avoids the obvious ploy of making Charging Elk more noble than the so-called civilized French. He is no paragon, nor are the French universally beastly. How they get along is a paen to the adaptability of the human race.

James Welch is without doubt a very gifted and extrodionary writer. I read "Fools Crow" and "Winter in the Blood" several years ago and now this. What a wonderful story of C.E. and how he was left behind when Buffalo Bill moved on. This is based on a true story (I even read about it on the www a year or so ago by accident). Charging Elk escapes from a hospital only to find himself in a totally foreign world; like another planet to him. All the people he comes in contact with regard him as an alien or a savage whose soul must be saved. He had dreams and remembers the old days with fondess and longing. He falls in love with a lady of the night with hopes and plans which all to soon are dashed by an "evilness". I don't want to spoil the story for anyone, but if you want to read a most beautiful story this is the one. There are some parts that are shocking to the innocent but you can bet that sort of thing went on very covertly. It gets sadder but does it have a happy ending or a sad one? You'll have to find out for yourself; you won't be disapointed either way because it's a great story.

Think of those old photos of Sioux Indians sitting stone-faced in Venetian gondolas or posing with Queen Victoria. What were those men thinking, warriors who until only very few years before had been riding full-tilt across the plains? In "the Heartsong of Charging Elk," James Welch imagines what it must have been like for a Sioux to travel across Europe with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.

Traveling with the show was pretty fun. Charging Elk and the other young men get to show off their riding skills, chase buffalo again, and shoot up a mock homestead. When they show was over, they went home to the tipis they traveled with - just like they'd done on the plains - joked, gambled, ate, and had a good time. The strange world around them was not much of a marvel or a curiosity, and very few whites made an impression (Queen Victoria was the exception. The Indians all liked her and called her Grandmother England.) Very few spoke any English, let alone French or Italian.

In Marseilles, Charging Elk becomes ill and was taken to the hospital. Wit no idea that arrangements had been made for him to rejoin the show in Rome, he leaves the hospital and disappears into the city.

He might as well be on Mars. He has no idea what people around him are doing. He cannot speak to anyone. The French are as bewildered by him as he is by them. But he knows that what he wants is to go home. Throughout the novel, Welch weaves Charging Elk's Sioux dream life through his days in working-class Marseilles. Will he fall in love? Make friends? Make a home in France, or find his way back to Red Cloud Agency?

Welch avoids the obvious ploy of making Charging Elk more noble than the so-called civilized French. He is no paragon, nor are the French universally beastly. How they get along is a paen to the adaptability of the human race.

This collection of essays and one poem celebrates the 1997 sesquicentennial of the Mormon settling of the Great Basin. The editors have reprinted articles taken from _BYU Studies_ over about a twenty-year period. The editors did an excellent job in the selection and placement of the articles, which are grouped generally by theme. Virtually no aspect of the Mormon migration is left untouched in this work. Selected photographs, drawings, and maps fill out the work.

Except for the opening essay by Elder M. Russell Ballard and the poem by Dian Saderup Monson, these essays are solid scholarly works. The essays by Leonard J. Arrington, Lewis Clark Christian, Stanley B. Kimball, Richard E. Bennett, and John Devitry-Smith deserve particular notice.

Elder Ballard originally gave his essay as a talk to the BYU Studies Academy. It is the sort of talk one would expect at General Conference - including the anti-intellectual undertone. Lawrence G. Coates' essay was an amalgamation of two articles. Printing them separately would have been better; the amalgamation left some redundancies and required a citation to the original articles anyway. The publishers printed the reproduced images too darkly.

Those quibbles aside, this is one of the finest collections of essays I have read. Anyone interested in the Mormon pioneers cannot afford to miss this work.

I recently bought this book for myself on-line. I had not seen the book in real life but I was not disappointed. The photographs are stunning. They are all black and white and bring an erie reality to how I pictured a lot of the places shown. I have been reading a lot of Native American history and it is nice to have photos of a lot of the places I have read about. The narratives are well written, although a little general in nature. Overall - a good coffee-table type book.

The book that I read was called Winter In The Blood by James Welch. This was a book about a character named Lame Bull and he is having visions about bad memories about things that have happened in the past and they are haunting him. These visions are about his brother dieing and his father freezing to death in the snow. he tries to figure out why these visions are bothering him so he goes to many different people. Then one guy says that he can tell him why these visons are haunting him and he also says that he can stop them.Then he goes to see the guy and they try to make them go away. Read this book to figure out if they succesfully make them go away or if they will not suceed

This Native-American novel takes place in Montana, around 1970. It is based on life on a cattle ranch that has been handed down two or three generations, obtained by hard work and great mechanical skill by First Raise, a Blackfoot Indian who did not live on the reservation. The main characters are Lame Bull (stepfather), Teresa (mother and owner of ranch) , Moses ( Teresa's dead son), First Raise (Teresa's first husband), the Old Woman (Teresa's mother), Agnes (Cree Indian woman) , and the narrator, James The story unfolds with little meaning at first and doesn't get much better as the story continues. For example, it is winter and the boys, Moses (14) and James (12) , go out to recover lost cattle while their father First Raise makes breakfast for them. Then the story cuts off and changes to a bar scene where James gets socked in the nose by a jealous boyfriend sitting with Agnes, a girls James used to date. The book has a lot a flashbacks, and they don't all seem to come together very well. There are some very good scenes in Part Two, where James goes to visit an old blind Indian names Yellow Calf. I feel scenes like these show the humanitarian side of James. This book has a lot of sexual overtones, bar scenes, and interesting points of view on American Indian lifestyles. Welch's writing has been compared to Ernest Hemingway's.

Winter in the Blood is a tour de force. Welch draws on Blackfeet (not "Indian") culture and history here, and he relies directly upon that tradition for the mythic center of this extraordinarily tight novel. If the reader doesn't know about Old Man and Old Woman from Blackfeet stories, he or she will miss much here, and if the reader expects stoic and vanishing Indians in another cliched novel there is bound to be disappointment. Welch uses this comic novel to comment brilliantly upon the long history of genocide Native Americans have to deal with and something like survivor's guilt that confronts Native people today. At the same time, Welch parodies from a Native perspective such mainstream American icons as T. S. Eliot and Saul Bellow. Readers not familiar with Native American, and particularly Blackfeet, traditions and cultures and accustomed to the usual stereotypes may well be confused by this superb novel, but the fault will lie with the reader and not the text.

Until the author mentions that he is a native american I thought he was just ignorantly biased. He laments the tourism of the Black Hills and Mt. Rushmore while complaing and totally ignores the Crazy Horse Memorial which will dwarf Rushmore when completed. He concludes that it was just fine for Means to block access to important segments of "Custer Battlefield National Monument" while ignoring the rights of other Americans to visit the battlefield. (My family came all the way from Texas and were unable to see the Reno site because of the illegal blockade which had nothing to do with the Sun Dance.) Who wants to hear the usual park service inaccurate litanies when the real 'mccoy' is outside the door. There should be a rating lower than 1 star for tripe such as this book. Of the more than 97 books I have on the Custer Battlefield and Indian wars, this one is the second worst. The author omits anything that would detract from his agenda and ignores countless resources that would prove his hypothesis wrong at many key points. He doesn't even believe the winter count records apparently. I was most disappointed in this book. The title should be " My views or A Midsummer Nights Dream". I wonder how much of his royalties the author has donated to the Northern Cheyenne or to the various Sioux councils.

Killing Custer starts out lame and limps along like a horse with three shoes! The Author has a good opportunity to present a Native American viewpoint on a great battle (Native American vs the White Anglo) but choose to wander and bounces from personal grudges to mythical happening to political agendas! As this book progress, the reader is left with the feeling that the material being presented is inadequate to make a complete book and that the author adds side-bars to flesh out the copy. Little new information is added to the existing knowledge and most of the material presented is tainted with the political subtones of the author. To bad... as this book could have been a good one for the library!

It's a good day to die; the book was issued in France under this title.Looking for other books on this american site,I was surprised and shocked to read some of the reviews.I think this book is important . Of course, I guess that many books have been written about this subject, and I don't know if this one gives us more informations than the others.But what is important to me is the fact that this book has been written by an indian,a man who has more than anyone else, the right to speak about what happened to his people. The 20's century great democracies, including France,can't be proud of their foundations.America with indian and black peoples,France in the West Indies ,and North Africa.One thing surprises me in the reviews of this book:a reviewer only writes about the Little Big Horn battle,although the book goes from 1869 to Sitting Bull's death in 1890.He is sad not to have been able to see the Reno site while visiting the country; personnaly,I would have prefered (and hope I'll have the opportunity) to spend a few hours on the place,near the river,where the Sioux and Cheyennes were living with their families.Another reviewer complains about "the political subtones of the author".And so what? Senator McCarthy fortunately died,no? And I think Mr Welch ,like any other human being, can and has to have a political conciousness.YOu can agree with him or not,but you can't reproach him with telling what he thinks .I was glad to read this book,and I recommend it to you.