Carl CarmerRezensionen

An amazing find, compilation of stories from the Old South. This had been a high school library shelved title. I wonder if it ever made the banned books list.

amz - $15

ebay - none

How do you make hurricanes boring? This snoozefest has a hurricane hitting Florida in the late 1940s, and yet the 11-year-old main character is more concerned about searching for sea shells. He's obsessed with earning money to help save his father's failing fishing career, pinning his hopes on a valuable shell or maybe that fishing contest with the big prize.

The only remarkable thing about this book is that comic book legend Jerry Robinson churned out the illustrations for it. Not a high-point in his career, for sure.

Carl Carmer was one of the most popular writers from the 1930s through the 1950s, that popularity based largely on the success of his 1934 folk memoir Stars Fell On Alabama, which chronicled his encounters with the people and cultural landscape of the state during the years that he taught at the University of Alabama. But Carmer was born and bred in the state of New York, a “Yorker” through and through. And as such, he wrote extensively on the state’s folklore, landscape, historical figures, and local customs. My Kind Of Country: Favorite Writings About New York is a collection of fifty-odd writings - poems, stories, and essays - from those decades. Carmer’s writing today seems quaint; and apart from the handful of tall tales, folklore, and ghost story, none of remainder is truly compelling, and sadly most of it is forgettable.

The Hudson by Carl Carmer was published in 1939. It was one of the earlier books in the Rivers of America series published by Farrar & Rinehart and edited by Constance Lindsay Skinner. The first of the series was published in 1937 and the last was not until the 1970s. Even though these books are quite dated now there is nothing else quite like them. The Hudson covers the history, geology and people of the Hudson River and it's valley. Before New York became a British colony the Dutch settled New York City, then called New Amsterdam, and Albany and much in between. The Dutch granted huge feudal land grants to a few wealthy families and the British continued to recognize these families rights to control land and collect rents and labor from the resident farmers. One reason the Hudson Valley farmers were so quick to join the American Revolution was that they hoped to secure their own farms from the feudal masters. This was not to happen and the history of the Hudson involved struggles for land rights for over 200 years. A bit out of date but still worthwhile to understand how part of our country developed.

Carmer was a Northerner who taught at the University of Alabama in the 1920s. This book is a hodgepodge of personal memories and collected stories. The stories are versions of folk tales or ghost stories that may be based on fact, but have fictionalized elements added in the telling. Carmer chooses the best version for his book. His personal memories are also a bit fictionalized to avoid offending some of the subjects. This is a raw, honest portrayal of the endemic racism of 1920s Alabama--but probably 1920s America as well, although Carmer certainly doesn't share in that belief. Still, his stories are full of white and black people using the N-word and using other racial stereotypes that will be very jarring for a modern reader. The racism of many of the Whites is purely endemic - it is so much an accepted part of their lives that they take it for granted. But the black characters, while not using the word in the same sense, also subscribe to many of the same outmoded beliefs. Carmer does a good job of going into black households and churches, and his portrait is probably quite accurate, but it speaks of times and attitudes that are thankfully alien to most of us in 2019. If you're an Alabama native, as I am, I recommend reading this book, as so much of it will awaken old memories and places. I don't think it will mean quite as much to a non-Alabama or non-Southern reader who doesn't pick up on the accents and ways of speaking that Carmer portrays with pretty much unfailing accuracy.

Wayne Flynt's introduction is excellent, by the way. No surprise there, of course. Definitely read it before diving into this book.½

Looks really familiar. I'm not 100% sure I read it when I was a kid, but I did read everything Bunyan I could find (growing up, as I did, on the MN/WI line we even learned about him in school) and I'm sure I would have loved this then.

excellent yet disturbing Northern Journalist narrative of social life in Alabama circa 1930 (Upper class judges in KKK) etc etc

I had been searching for quite a while for a copy of this book that I could afford; since it was somewhat of a disappointment, I was glad I hadn't splurged on it. Still, there are a lot of interesting old songs, each connected to one of the rivers of America, although not all the rivers ended up being the subject of a book (since this book was published quite early in the series.) It should not surprise anyone that some of the songs evince a careless racism common at the time. Composed songs of the twentieth century are absent, so there's no "Banks of the Wabash" or "Miss the Mississippi and You." But the musician or song historian will find much of interest in this book.

3559. Stars Fell on Alabama, by Carl Carmer (read 17 Mar 2002) Reading this was first suggested to me when I read the aforementioned Fifty Years of Best Sellers on 22 May 1946 but I never did till it was discussed on a book board I follow, and since I had access to it from a local college library, I decided to finally read it. It was a 1934 nonfiction bestseller, and is an account of the six years the author spent in Jim Crow Alabama in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The author does not approve of the then prevalent white Alabamian view but reports it in a non-condemnatory way. The book is full of non-interesting things (e.g., much discussion of Ala. superstitions) to one not connected to Alabama.

Selected source materials on Nazi persecution of religion. Probably done as war propoaganda, but useful as sources.

$11 to $50. Beautiful illustrations, cover, excellent condition.