North Carolina Bookwatch 2006-2007 | UNC-TV

DG Martin interviews Pat Taylor - Fourth Down and Goal To Go In this episode of North Carolina Bookwatch, Taylor expounds on the events that have shaped North Carolina into the state it is today. Commenting on parts of North Carolina history, he successfully explains the present economic, political and social atmosphere of the region found in his must-read for any native North Carolinian or Southern historian.

DG Martin interviews Charles Frazier - Thirteen Moons In this episode of UNC-TV’s local literary series North Carolina Bookwatch, Frazier shares his all-new story in which a rootless and restless protagonist, like Cold Mountain’s embattled hero, Inman, expends the energies of a long lifetime seeking permanent reunion with the only woman he’ll ever love.

DG Martin interviews Lee Smith - On Agate Hill It is 1872, Agate Hill, North Carolina. On her thirteenth birthday, Molly Petree peeps out the chink of a window from her secret hiding place up in the eaves of a tumbledown old plantation house to survey a world gone wild, all expectations overthrown, all order gone. “I know I am a spitfire and a burden,” she begins her diary. “I do not care. My family is a dead family, and this is not my home, for I am a refugee girl…but evil or good I will write it all down every true thing in black and white upon the page, for evil or good it is my own true life and I WILL have it. I will.” Carefully she places the diary in her treasured “box of phenomena” which will contain “letters, poems, songs, court records, marbles, rocks, dolls, and a large collection of bones, some human and some not” by the time it is found during a historic renovation project in 2003.

DG Martin interviews Angela Davis-Gardner - Plum Wine In this episode of North Carolina Bookwatch, author and North Carolina State University professor Angela Davis-Gardner examines the human relationships, cultural differences, and the irreparable consequences of war that runs deep in Plum Wine 's original and timeless tale.

DG Martin interviews Paul Leonard - Music of a Thousand Hammers-Inside Habitat for Humanity Habitat for Humanity International focuses on two goals. The first is to build as many houses as it can, using the principles of sweat equity, no interest, no-profit, volunteer-driven construction- one house, one family at a time-in every corner of the world. Today, Habitat is completing a house somewhere in the world every 26 minutes (20,000 per year). Habitat also attempts to make housing a matter of conscience everywhere. Habitat wants everyone to understand that it is morally and socially unacceptable for any human being not to have a simple, decent place to sleep at night. Yet, all is not well in the Habitat household. In late 2004, Habitat’s founder Millard Fuller was forced out of his job by the board of directors of the Christian homebuilding ministry. The announcement that Fuller was stepping down came near the end of a tumultuous year for Fuller and the Americus, Georgia-based organization that he co-founded in 1976 with his wife, Linda. The year included allegations against Fuller by a female employee of inappropriate behavior and a struggle concerning the organization’s future. The shakeout, now apparently complete, could affect Habitat for years.

DG Martin interviews Mark Ethridge - Grievances For more than twenty years, the murder of a thirteen-year-old boy during racial unrest in rural South Carolina has gone unpunished, unsolved, even uninvestigated. But that changes when Charlotte Times reporter Matt Harper sits down with a fellow who shows up in the newsroom—a guy with a grievance. As he struggles with his journalistic legacy, Harper comes to understand why the investigation must be pursued and why he must be the one to do it—despite the opposition of his publisher, violent threats from mysterious forces that do not want the story told, and his father's ill health.

DG Martin interviews Art Chansky - Blue Blood For fifty years, the rivalry between Duke and Carolina has featured famous brawls, endless controversy, long-nurtured hatred—and some of the best basketball ever played in the history of the sport. The Duke-Carolina rivalry has fostered more than thirty former players from the two schools playing or coaching in the NBA; it has cultivated a maniacal subculture of fans who camp out for weeks just to get tickets to the seasonal matchups; it has enchanted a nation of spectators to watch games between the archrivals, garnering some of the highest regular-season TV ratings in history. Art Chansky's Blue Blood : Duke-Carolina: Inside the Most Storied Rivalry in College Hoops is a chronicle of the Duke-Carolina fight as it has evolved over the last fifty years— celebrateing the history of this rivalry, the traditions, the heritage, and, most importantly—the spectacular basketball.

DG Martin interviews Will Blythe - To Hate Like This is to be Happy Forever The basketball rivalry between Duke and North Carolina is the fiercest blood feud in college athletics. To legions of otherwise reasonable adults, it is a conflict that surpasses sports; it is locals against outsiders, elitists against populists, even good against evil. It is thousands of grown men and women with jobs and families screaming themselves hoarse at eighteen-year-old basketball geniuses, trading conspiracy theories in online chat rooms, and weeping like babies when their teams—when they —lose. In North Carolina, where both schools are located, the rivalry may be a way of aligning oneself with larger philosophic ideals—of choosing teams in life—a tradition of partisanship that reveals the pleasures and even the necessity of hatred.

DG Martin interviews John Hart - King of Lies John Hart's stunning debut, King of Lies is a complex mystery thriller. Hart's protagonist, Jackson Workman Pickens, whom most people call "Work," is a struggling North Carolina criminal defense attorney. Work has wrestled with inner demons for most of his life, especially after the death of his mother and the disappearance of his wealthy father, Ezra Pickens, a highly successful lawyer who took him into his practice. When Work Pickens finds his father murdered, the investigation pushes a repressed family history to the surface and he sees his own carefully constructed facade begin to crack.

DG Martin interviews Sarah Dessen - Just Listen New York Times Bestselling author Sarah Dessen returns with Just Listen , a multi-layered, impossible to put down book that perfectly depicts Annabel, a teenager dealing with the hardest year of her life. Last year, Annabel was "the girl who has everything"—at least that's the part she played in the television commercial for Kopf 's Department Store.This year, she's the girl who has nothing: no best friend because mean-but-exciting Sophie dropped her, no peace at home since her older sister became anorexic, and no one to sit with at lunch. Until she meets Owen Armstrong—tall, dark, and music-obsessed, Owen is a reformed bad boy with a commitment to truth telling. With Owen's help, maybe Annabel can face what happened the night she and Sophie stopped being friends.

DG Martin interviews Kristin Henderson - While They’re at War There is a war story most Americans never hear. It is the story of what life is like for the women and men who are married to the military when a loved one is deployed. Most have seen the tearful goodbyes and the joyful homecomings occasionally caught on camera, but the rest of the homefront experience has been hidden behind closed doors, until now. In While They're at War: The True Story of American Families on the Homefront , author Kristin Henderson exposes the often-difficult aspects of military culture on and off America's bases.

DG Martin interviews David Payne - Back to Wando Passo David Payne has been hailed as "the most gifted American novelist of his generation" ( Boston Globe ) and has been likened to "Pat Conroy or perhaps a Southern John Irving" ( Winston-Salem Journal ). Now, in his new novel, Back to Wando Passo , Payne introduces us to Ransom Hill, lead singer of a legendary-but-now-defunct indie rock group who has come to South Carolina to turn over a new leaf. A bighearted artist and a bit of a wild man, Ran knows that his wife Claire's patience with him hangs by a frayed thread. After a five-month separation, he's come south from New York City to rejoin her and their two young children at Wando Passo, Claire's inherited family estate, determined to save his marriage, his family, and himself.

DG Martin interviews John Hope Franklin - Mirror to America At ninety years old, John Hope Franklin remains one of the most admired, influential and relevant historians in the world. Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin is not only a unique and invaluable historical document, but a testament to the courage and determination of one American who throughout the twentieth century and in the twenty-first—from the first petition he was selected to deliver to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to his appointment as chair of President Clinton's taskforce (to say nothing of his writing and scholarship)—has helped redirect the social and political course of our nation.

DG Martin interviews Allan Gurganus - New Stories from the South In the third decade of the New Stories from the South series—the book welcomes a new editor—Allan Gurganus. In this latest collection, Gurganus combed through hundreds of short stories written in 2005 to assemble a muscular array of talent, twenty stories ranging from low-down, high-octane farce to dark, erotic suspense.

DG Martin interviews Andrew Britton - The American With a mix of his own military knowledge and vivid creativity, Andrew Britton sets his new novel The American in contemporary times, introducing readers to 33-year-old Ryan Kealy, a man who has achieved more in his military and CIA career than most men can dream of in a lifetime, but who has also seen the worst life has to offer and is lucky to have survived it. Now, living on the coast of Maine, Ryan wants nothing more than to be left to his sporadic teaching and his demons. However, he is soon brought out of retirement when a complicated terrorist plot to assassinate the U.S., French, and Italian presidents by Al-Qaeda, Iranian terrorists, and even Americans out to destroy their own country, is uncovered.

DG Martin interviews Leah Stewart - The Myth of You and Me When Cameron was fifteen, Sonia was her best friend---no one could come between them. Now Cameron is a twenty-nine-year-old research assistant with no meaningful ties to anyone except her aging boss, noted historian Oliver Doucet.When an unexpected letter arrives from Sonia ten years after the incident that ended their friendship, Cameron doesn't reply, despite Oliver's urging. But then he passes away, and Cameron discovers that he has left her with one final task: to track down Sonia and hand-deliver a mysterious package to her. Now without a job, a home, and a purpose, Cameron decides to honor his request, setting off on the road to find this stranger who was once her inseparable other half.

DG Martin interviews Tom Carlson - Hatteras Blues When young Ernal Foster spent his life savings to build a juniper-hulled sportfishing boat in 1937, he gave birth to what would become the multimillion-dollar charter fishing industry on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Today, Ernal's son, Captain Ernie Foster, struggles to keep the family business alive in a time of great change on the Outer Banks. Hatteras Blues is their story—a story of triumph and loss, of sturdy Calvinist values and pell-mell American progress, and of fate and luck as capricious as the weather. Within the engaging saga of the rise and decline of one family's livelihood, Tom Carlson relates the high-adrenaline experience of blue-water sportfishing and the precarious early development of Hatteras Village in the heart of "Hurricane Alley."

DG Martin interviews Bill Smith - Seasoned in the South For more than a decade now, Bill Smith has presided over the kitchen at Crook's Corner, bringing his instinctive and creative approach to cooking to an ever-growing, always enthusiastic crowd who have come to associate dining at Crook's with good company, great food, and a belief that every meal is a reason for celebration. Bill Smith's recipes are marvelously uncomplicated: Tomato and Watermelon Salad, Fried Green Tomatoes with Corn and Mustard Butter Sauce, Cold Stuffed Pork Loin with an Artichoke Spread, Scallops with Spinach and Hominy, Really Good Banana Pudding, and Honeysuckle Sorbet. Structured around the seasons and inspired by the abundant local produce, these recipes not only reinvent classics of Southern culinary tradition, but offer up imaginative interpretations of bistro fare.

DG Martin interviews William Leuchtenburg - The White House Looks South Perhaps not southerners in the usual sense, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and Lyndon B. Johnson each demonstrated a political style and philosophy that helped them influence the South and unite the country in ways that few other presidents have. Their intimate associations with the South gave these three presidents an empathy toward and acceptance in the region. In urging southerners to jettison outworn folkways, Roosevelt could speak as a neighbor and adopted son, Truman as a border-stater who had been taught to revere the Lost Cause, and Johnson as a native who had been scorned by Yankees.

DG Martin interviews Dot Jackson - Refuge In Refuge , a young Charleston society matron named Mary Seneca Steele goes to bed while considering what to wear for her suicide. Now, suddenly seized by an otherworldly fiddle tune playing in her head, she arises, steals her children and her husband's new Auburn Phaeton, and sets out on a journey of enlightenment in the year 1929, which begins with learning to drive. Before she makes this impetuous exit from the proper South, Mary Sen's worst transgression has been going out in public without her hat. But there will be no returning to her old life once she abandons it.