Ready for Checkout

The following purchases are ready to be checked out:

DVDs
Hope Floats
Carolina Moon
Hancock
Freedom
Wanted
Days of Thunder
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Gridiron Gang
Bride Wars
The Happening
The Bucket List
Changeling

Books
The American Plague by Molly Crosby In a summer of panic and death in 1878, more than half the population of Memphis, Tenn., fled the raging yellow fever epidemic, which finally waned when cooler weather set in. The disease had been transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which came in swarms on ships from the Caribbean or West Africa. This account has a narrower scope than James Dickerson's recent Yellow Fever, focusing on the Memphis tragedy, but journalist Crosby offers a forceful narrative of a disease's ravages and the quest to find its cause and cure. Crosby is particularly good at evoking the horrific conditions in Memphis, "a city of corpses" and rife with illness characterized by high fever, black vomit and hemorrhaging, treated by primitive methods. Crosby also relates arresting tales of heroism, such as how two nuns returned to the quarantined city from a vacation to nurse the victims. The author profiles scientists, some of whom died in their fight to identify the cause of this deadly disease. She also describes more recent outbreaks in Africa: yellow fever is making a frightening comeback despite the existence of a vaccine.
from Publisher's Weekly

The Devil's Punch Bowl by Greg Isles  From New York Times bestselling author Greg Iles comes his most electrifying thriller yet. The Devil's Punchbowl reveals a world of depravity, sex, violence, and the corruption of a Southern town. As a prosecuting attorney in Houston, Penn Cage sent hardened killers to death row. But it is as mayor of his hometown — Natchez, Mississippi — that Penn will face his most dangerous threat. Urged by old friends to try to restore this fading jewel of the Old South, Penn has ridden into office on a tide of support for change. But in its quest for new jobs and fresh money, Natchez, like other Mississippi towns, has turned to casino gambling, and now five fantastical steamboats float on the river beside the old slave market at Natchez like props from Gone With the Wind. But one boat isn't like the others. Rumor has it that the Magnolia Queen has found a way to pull the big players from Las Vegas to its Mississippi backwater. And with them — on sleek private jets that slip in and out of town like whispers in the night — come pro football players, rap stars, and international gamblers, all sharing an unquenchable taste for one thing: blood sport — and the dark vices that go with it. When a childhood friend of Penn's who brings him evidence of these crimes is brutally murdered, the full weight of Penn's failure to protect his city hits home. So begins his quest to find the men responsible. But it's a hunt he begins alone, for the local authorities have been corrupted by the money and power of his hidden enemy. With his family's lives at stake, Penn realizes his only allies in his one-man war are those bound to him by blood or honor.
from Barnes & Noble

The Help by Kathryn Stockett  If you've enjoyed the southern charm of Fannie Flagg or The Secret Life of Bees, you'll find The Help a delight. Miss Eugenia Phelan ("Skeeter" to her friends) is a young woman of privilege who enjoys her fellow Junior Leaguers but sometimes finds their ways at odds with her own principles. She plays the part of her station in 1960s Mississippi but can't help feeling dissatisfied with keeping house and acting as recording secretary at league meetings, and yearns for something more. Minny, Miss Celia, Aibileen, and Yule May are maids employed by Skeeter's friends. Each woman cooks, cleans, and cares for her boss's children, suffering slights and insults silently and sharing household secrets only among themselves. In the wake of the Junior League push to create separate bathrooms for the domestic help within private homes, Skeeter contacts a New York book editor with an idea. Soon she's conducting clandestine meetings with "the help" to capture their stories for publication. It is a daring and foolhardy plan, one certain to endanger not only the positions but the lives of the very women whose stories she transcribes -- as well as her own.   from Barnes & Noble

The Most They Ever Had by Rick Bragg  In spring 2001, a community of people in the Appalachian foothills has come to the edge of all they had ever been.  Now, they stood looking down, bitter, angry, afraid.  Across the South, padlocks and logging chains bound the doors of silent mills, and it seemed a miracle to blue-collar people in Jacksonville Alabama, that their mill still bit, shook, and roared.  The century-old hardwood floors still trembled under whirling steel, and people worked on, in a mist of white air.  The mill had become almost a living thing, rewarding the hard-working and careful with the best payday they ever had, but punishing the careless and clumsy, taking a finger, a hand, and more.  from book jacket

High Cotton : Four Seasons in the Mississippi Delta by Gerard Helferich The rich, flat topsoil of the Mississippi Delta has seen both astonishing economic production and some of the most tragic history in our nation's past. It is, in Richard Ford's apt phrase, "the South's South." Contested ground since European explorers first set foot there three centuries ago, it turned out to have the ideal climate for growing cotton, a crop that seemed destined to a marginal role in America's economy until technology and politics combined to make it one of the driving forces behind our bloodiest war. Its legacy echoed in the racial divide of the century that followed. Against this historical backdrop, Gerard Helferich traces the life of a modern cotton farmer, exploring the traditions of growing cotton that have endured since ancient times-and the current forces that threaten to drive small farmers from the land. High Cotton spends a year with small-time farmer Zack Killebrew and his family, recording the annual cycle of planting, cultivation, and harvest, as Zack teeters between the promise of a six-figure payoff and the ever-present peril of financial ruin. Combining an engaging personal narrative, a strong sense of time and place, and a McPheelike attention to process, High Cotton is a story with deep roots in American history.   from Barnes & Noble

Books on Tape
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
We Are All Welcome Here by Elizabeth Berg
Between Georgia by Joshilyn Jackson
Home Safe by Elizabeth Berg

Dalby Visits Moohread Campus

Mississippi writer Robert Dalby visited the Moorhead campus this past Wednesday in conjunction with the Author Series sponsored each semester by the Stanny Sanders Library.  Dalby is the author of the Piggly Wiggly series of books centered in the town of Second Creek, Mississippi, and which involve a group of older ladies known as the Nitwits.  The books have the charm that exposes the odd and eccentric southern characters that we all know and love or even with which we put up in our small towns across the delta.

During the morning session, Dalby spoke to students in several of the English classes and answered questions.

Below is a quick photo opt with Dalby.  Left is Audrey Beach, coordinator of the Author Series, Dalby, Elizabeth Vance, a student from Greenville, and Mary Ruth Brindley, English Instructor.

After the program Dalby offers advice to Elizabeth, who is an aspiring young writer.

During the afternoon session, Dalby spoke to the public and also signed books as part of a reception honoring the writer.  A treat of the afternoon was the attendance of Hambone, a well-know fixture of the Piggly Wiggly store in Indianola.  He worked at the store from the early 1950s until the store closed in 1999.  When he heard that a writer about a Piggly Wiggly store was going to be on campus, Hambone talked Enterprise-Tocsin publisher, Wayne Parham,  into bringing him to the event.

Below Hambone talks with Dalby.

Dalby signs a book for Mary Ann Brocato.

Signe Adams talks with Dalby during the reception.