Reading List

Shem Creek by Dorothea Benton Frank
Fluffy read - about a woman who brings her daughters back to South Carolina and finds a new life.

South of Broad by Pat Conroy
Modern day story painted with Charleston as a canvas.

Some Sing Some Cry by Ntozake Shange and Ifa Bayeza

Novel written by two sisters, begins in post Civil War Charleston and follows a musical family through several generations.



Low Country Summer: A Plantation Novel by Dorothea Benton Frank

A Fire-Eater Remembers: The Confederate Memoir of Robert Barnwell Rhett
Memoir of Robert B. Rhett - I am still reading this - Got interested in R. B. Rhett when his name kept coming up all over Charleston. His is buried in Magnolia Cemetery.

A Separate Country by Robert Hicks
Based on the post Civil War life of Confederate General John Bell Hood.  After the war, General Hood is first consumed with the desire to justify his actions during the war and later attempts to make amends for them.

Widow of the South by Robert Hicks
Based on the story of the Carrie McGavock, the woman a house that became a field hospital following the battle of Franklin. I've visited Carnton Plantation and McGavock Confederate Cemetery where under Mrs. McGavock's supervision unclaimed dead from the battle of Franklin were moved. The plantation is beautiful, but when I visit, I think of Confederate Generals laid out on the porch, a pile of amputated arms thrown the window of a make shift surgical suite, and the Mrs. McGavock walking the cemetery every day with her book of the dead.

Charleston Blacksmith: The Work of Philip Simmons by John Michael Vlach
Waiting to get this from Amazon - a book about the iron work of Charleston

Architects of Charleston by Beatrice St. Julien Ravenel
On my wish list.