About this Item
Photographs by David Rae Morris. Book is clean and tight. Dust Jacket covered with mylar. First Edition - first printing. 109 pages plus a photographic narrative entitled Look Away.11 inches high by 9 3/4 inches wide. Seller Inventory # 005960
Bibliographic Details
Title: My Mississippi
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, Mississippi
Publication Date: 2000
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Good
Edition: First Edition
About this title
A father and son's eloquent portrait and personal evocations of modern Mississippi
An exerpt from the book:
"Through the years two of the most singular extremes have been the desire, on the one hand, to dwell forever with all the myths and trimmings of a vanished culture which may never have truly existed in the first place, certainly not the way we wished it to, and the frantic compulsion, on the other, to reforge ourselves as an appendage of the capitalistic, go-getting, entrepreneurial North. . . . Between these two extremes there have been complex lights and shadings, and considerable ambivalence and suffering. Mississippians watch the same television as other Americans, frequent the same shopping malls and national franchise chainstores and fast-food establishments, and live in the same kind of suburbias. . . . At the new century it is the juxtapositions of Mississippi, emotional and in remembrance, and the tensions of its paradoxes that still drive us crazy. . . . In my work on this book certain ironies never failed to tease me."
-- Willie Morris, 1999
Few writers have ever approached their native terrains with such an inclusive and compassionate understanding as Willie Morris. This book, his last, circles back home where he started. To love it and discover it one more time, he and his son David Rae take us on a trip through contemporary Mississippi.
Who could express so passionately an understanding of the Mississippi landscape? Who could capture so unerringly the state's contrasting and often contradictory faces? For his readers the answer is Willie Morris. For Morris it is his photographer son.
Surveying the familiar yet always strangely evocative panorama that became his literary terrain, My Mississippi contemplates the realities of the present day, assesses the most vital concerns of the citizens, gauges how the state has changed, and beholds what Mississippi is like as it enters the twenty-first century. This southern homeland to which Morris returned after terminating his career as a New York editor remained for him a tantalizing mystery, the touchstone for all his thoughts, and one of the last unique places in America. For Morris, despite its flaws, Mississippi is beloved.
With father and son in their peregrinations we witness what they see and hear -- "the bugs on our windshield in the Delta springtime, the off-key echoes of high-school bands from the little Piney Woods football fields in the autumn, the supple twilights and sultry breezes on 'the Coast,' the hunting camps and picnics, and parades and pilgrimages, the catfish ponds and graveyards, the roadhouses and joints near the closing hour, the art galleries and concert halls, the riverboat casinos and courthouse squares, the historical landmarks of the old and the industrial complexes of the new."
"It has been a pleasure," Morris says, "more than that, an honor, to collaborate with my son on this project."
The son grew up in New York City, seeing his father's native land from the perspective of an outsider. As an adult he has chosen to live in or near Mississippi and has spent the past twenty years traveling and photographing the state. In a thoughtful and provocative photographic narrative entitled "Look Away," he presents striking, full-color images of his Mississippi.
This complementary collaboration of father and son unites their separate visions and shared love of a place that remains infinitely intriguing for everyone.
A father and son?s eloquent portrait and personal evocations of modern Mississippi
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Store Description
Boyd J. Holdaway
BJ's Book Barn
2005 Towne Manor Dr NW
Kennesaw, GA 30144-2982
678-290-9445
bjholdaway@att.net
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