A Guide to Our Two Savannahs (Book and DVD) - Softcover

Ellis Garvin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0982464908 ISBN 13: 9780982464908

Publisher: Garvin Publishing Company, 2010

Synopsis

A GUIDE TO OUR TWO SAVANNAHS is a comprehensive book featuring a site by site tour of historic Savannah, Georgia, USA.

It includes a full-length DVD of author Ellis Garvin presenting insider facts and folklore. Almost 200 photographs of city s Historic District and outlying neighborhood areas, including images of well-known cemeteries and monuments.

Also: Bibliography of additional titles; List of questions that visitors to Savannah can ask tour guides to help facilitate discussions about its history and culture. Concise answers are provided as well, some of which many are likely to find surprising.

In addition, it features: an extended index of places an d people; and photographic essay on the St. Patrick s Day Parade.

About this title

About the Author

Few authors or photographers could hope to provide as authentic a perspective on life in the American Southeast as Ellis Garvin does in A GUIDE TO OUR TWO SAVANNAHS. Garvin was born December 20, 1934, just north of Savannah, Georgia, in Clyo near the Savannah River.

With his father Major Julius Garvin, mother Earlene Smith Garvin, and seven brothers and sisters, Ellis grew up in Clyo on a farm. There, like the rest of his family, he tended livestock made up of chickens, hogs, mules, and cows; and raised crops while also obtaining as much education as area schools had to offer at the time. After an adulthood of travel, work, and raising a family, Garvin enrolled in 1999 at Armstrong Atlantic University, where he studied English and obtained his B.A. in 2005 at the age of 71.

Since first coming back to Savannah, Ellis realized that the city had grown more famous and much more modern than it was during the time of his childhood, and now entertained millions of visitors every year from all over the world. He also noted that much of the information these visitors received about it tended to be incomplete when it came to a balanced history of African Americans and Anglo/European Americans in the city. Consequently, with his new degree and a camera firmly in hand, Ellis set out to create A Guide to Our Two Savannahs, a more balanced account in images and words of the city s extraordinary multicultural heritage. The resulting achievement is one that speaks beautifully for itself.

Review

The great beauty of the city of Savannah, Georgia, is both well documented and frequently celebrated. From the eclectic nature of the classic architecture that adorns its famous Historic District to the red brick cobbled streets and downtown squares that make the city uniquely appealing, Savannah stands as a city of choice for tourists who travel from all over the world to enjoy its year-round festivals and enthralling history.

What many have been longing to understand, and what Ellis Garvin now makes clear in A Guide to Our Two Savannahs, his new book and DVD, is that the city has a fascinating dual personality shaped by its diversely rich cultural heritage. Garvin blends traditional southern storytelling narrative with the keen observations of an historian to illustrate Savannah s Black and White bi-racial character.

Whereas the average tour guide might shy away from discussing certain aspects of the city s history and culture, Garvin has chosen to take some of the more controversial aspects of the subject and make them the focus of this compelling. He does this by discussing in both the book of A GUIDE TO OUR TWO SAVANNAHS, and on the DVD that comes with it, the story of the city s segregated past and how that past led to the development of various institutions that serve the same function but cater to different separate races.

The author and photographer makes his point with almost 200 photographs, many of them providing side by side comparisons. In one example we see the Laurel Grove South Cemetery where African Americans are buried in contrast to the northern part of the cemetery where Anglo/European Americans are buried. In the book as well as on the DVD, Garvin talks about famed civil rights activist W.W. Law s efforts to properly maintain the southern end of the cemetery until the city eventually took over its maintenance.

Garvin provides more, however, than a simple catalogue of racial parallels in A Guide to Our Two Savannahs. The book also showcases images of some of the city s most treasured sites. Among them are: the famously picturesque downtown squares that give the Historic District so much of its charm; recent and older monuments; interior and exterior views of some of the world s most beautiful churches; the former slave quarters and barracoons where Africans were once held until sold as slaves; and rare examples of classic-styled architecture.

Rather than present a straightforward history of this beloved city, Ellis provides us with an authentic tour that starts at the Visitor s Center, continues with an exploration of surrounding neighborhoods, and concludes with a walk in the St. Patrick s Day Parade and along beautiful River Street. The author s voice, in the book as well as the DVD, comes through filled with a richness of character and with a powerful passion for his subject that makes A Guide to Our Two Savannahs a unique, memorable, and valuable addition to the literature on a truly great city. --Creative Thinkers International

Edition details

• Publisher: Garvin Publishing Company
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0982464908
• ISBN 13: 9780982464908
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160