This engrossing biography of Roland McMillan Harper, “Pioneering Botanist of the Southern Coastal Plain,” is clearly a labor of love as well as an extraordinary feat of erudition.... Like many others plagued with the onus of genius, Harper was rife with eccentricities. In the scientific circles he moved in, he became legendary for his encyclopedic knowledge of plants and regional terrain, much of which was gleaned during long, solitary treks over the countryside and coastal plains of Alabama, Georgia, and the Florida Panhandle.

Vicksburg, 1863, is Groom’s fifteenth book, and it is beginning to look as if he will be known, in the end, as Winston Groom, gifted narrative historian, not just as the author of Forrest Gump, notwithstanding how delightful that novel is.

The erasure of George Bridgetower from 182 years of Beethoven biographies inspires Rita Dove’s new book Sonata Mulattica, a kind of speculative elegy that appends to the biographies an extended and playfully conjectured footnote. Dove recognizes in Bridgetower a familiar historical archetype: The black or brown artist whose genius and importance, the authors of history seem to have agreed, are negligible. It’s a syndrome that treats some of history’s marquee stars like background scenery, props in the lives of their white counterparts.

Each of the ten titled chapters in this book first appeared as a short story in The Sewanee, Southern, Yale or Kenyon Reviews, TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, StoryQuarterly, or Prairie Schooner. That the author has a significant presence in elite literary circles is borne out by dust jacket blurbs from Melanie Rae Thon, Anthony Doerr, Brad Watson, George Core, Richard Ford, Lee K. Abbott, and Alan Cheuse.

In his poem “Firm Against the Pattern,” the first of twenty-nine poems in his new collection titled Black Sabbatical, poet Brett Eugene Ralph writes: “Closing my eyes, I extended my tongue / and pressed it firm against the pattern: / I tasted yesterday’s rain, / the carcasses of moths, / broken glances, tears, / the smoke of not-so-distant fires— / all those desperate gestures / we collect and call the seasons.” These lines, so reminiscent in their focus, set the tone for Black Sabbatical—a collection that frequently hopes to navigate the connections between character, place, and memory.

From the publisher: John Skipper is thrown into the world of the mountain-dwelling Cherokee after a land and jewel prospector murders his family. During his stay in the care of the Cherokee people, he meets Tsalahi Hinote, the daughter of Red Tree, the Cherokee chief. John discovers that George Prescott, the man who murdered his family, had done so in order to profit from emeralds he found on Cherokee land. John subsequently takes his revenge on Prescott and departs, taking Tsalahi with him—leaving the Cherokee to fend off blame from the white settlers who seek to possess their land.

Why yet another book on Yogi Berra? Simple answer, according to author Allen Barra: There has never been a serious biography of the Hall of Fame catcher, noted mostly for his years with the New York Yankees and his ability to churn out seemingly dimwitted but nevertheless amusing sayings. Barra says Berra is America’s most beloved former athlete and the most quoted American since Mark Twain. It’s hard to deny either assertion.

Kathryn Tucker Windham’s memoir is refreshing because it is not about childhood trauma; there is no abuse or poverty in this story. Rather, it is a nostalgic look back to a distant childhood and a past era of the American South. Windham’s remembrances are tender without being sentimental, and the tone of Spit, Scarey Ann, & Sweat Bees: One Thing Leads to Another is one of tranquility, as if Windham is writing simply because she enjoys savoring her memories.

Considering such a large audience for To Kill a Mockingbird, it is little surprise that Viking would have wanted to include Harper Lee in its Up Close series, which publishes short biographies for young readers on a wide range of important figures from the twentieth century. The publisher approached Kerry Madden, author of books for young readers, about writing the biography, and she took on the daunting task of researching the life of a subject who has not given an interview since 1964 and who has made it known widely that she will not cooperate with any such project.

The saga of this family began with William James Samford, who was a successful attorney and governor of Alabama. He took to heart the words of Luke 12:48 that “To whom much has been given, much is expected,” and he ensured that the virtues of hard work, service to others, duty to country, and standing up for what’s right were passed on to his children and grandchildren. In A Generous Life, Wayne Greenhaw chronicles the life and times of his great-grandson, William James (Jimmy) Samford Jr.

While I was growing up in Montevallo, my father often mused that if I took the inclination, I could launch my canoe in Shoal Creek across the street from our house and paddle all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Headwaters: A Journey on Alabama Rivers, with text by John C. Hall and photographs by Beth Maynor Young, offers a much easier tour of the state’s diverse water system–from rain dripping from beech leaves into the soil in mountainous northern Alabama to the "Great River’s" arrival at Mobile Bay.

Auburn University English professor R. A. Riekki has wowed critics with his novel U.P., drawing speculative praise from one fellow writer who is convinced that Kurt Vonnegut would love the book if only Vonnegut were alive to read it. Vonnegut must have had a stronger stomach than I. According to the book’s cover summary, U.P. is a “complex tale of friendship and brutality.” Complex and brutal? That’s one heck of an understatement. Rather, Riekki slaps the reader in the face with a stark, disturbing portrayal of teen angst in the frozen northern peninsula of Michigan.

Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory presents an in-depth analysis of the various myth, fiction, history, and other embodiments of the mammy characters between the 1820s and 1935. Kimberly Wallace-Sanders probes the images and themes immortalized in American literary and cultural imagination that continue to have a provocative hold on the American psyche. This book engages questions asked time and time again: Who is this mammy? What does she reveal about race and the American culture? Why do portraits of her insist she preferred white children to her own? How did she become a central figure in our understanding of slavery, gender, motherhood, and the American South?

Behind the Hedges, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Rich Whitt, is a riveting tale of self-interested bureaucrats, politicians, and power-brokers and how they will do most anything to preserve their power and influence. On the surface, the book is a stinging indictment of University of Georgia President Michael Adams, his senior staff, and the news media (including Witt’s former employer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution) that turned a blind eye to improper and perhaps illegal activities. As a sad aside, the author died as this book was published.

This flawlessly written book for children ages eight-up is framed by a grandfather donkey taking advantage of a rainy day to tell his two grandchildren donkeys stories about his associations with Jesus. The grandfather donkey tells how he was scared to be ridden, only to find that his rider was none other than the gentle Jesus. The grandfather’s parents, he said, knew Mary and Joseph. His mother, he said, carried Mary to Bethlehem at the time of Jesus’ birth. The grandfather donkey tells how he carried Jesus to the temple when he threw out the money changers, healed the sick, defended himself against tax collectors, and taught the crowds. The grandfather donkey also witnessed Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, on the cross, and at the resurrection.