Published works by Hunter James
Books
All The Forgotten Places
The Quiet People of the Land
They Didn't Put That on the Huntley-Brinkley
Atlanta After Sherman
The Last Days of Big Grassy Fork
Smile Pretty and Say Jesus
Old Salem Guidebook: Historic Guide to Old Salem Architecture
The Candidate, The Commies and The World's Longest Camel
Contributions
The Southern Review
The Roanoke Review
Reviews
Selected excerpts from reviews of my most recent book, The Last Days of Big
Grassy Fork:
“, , , Winston-Salem’s Hunter James hits a little too close to home with his new book,
even though the earth he is, or was, trying to save could only be called a little piece of
farmland inside the snapping jaws of ‘progress’ Winston-Salem style. Both as a
career journalist and a landowner, James has done his share of running afoul of the
American Way. Now, with this book, he sands a better than even chance of being flat
run out of Winston. There’s enough in this cantankerous, eloquent, laugh-out-loud
funny yet ultimately sorrowful book to offend virtually everyone in Forsyth County—
old money, new money, Baptists, Moravians, even members of his own family.”
—Frank Levering, author and environmental activist, in the Winston-Salem Sunday
Journal.
. . .”Skillfully interweaving personal memoirs with community history, The Last Days of
Big Grassy Fork is irresistible. I galloped from page to page and took it hard when
the book had to end.”
—Fred Chappell, nationally known poet and novelist.
. . “James is . . . smart enough to realize that the sell-off of the South has been going
on a long, long time (‘Yankee money, Yankee hucksters, Yankee domination, with
New South boosterism merely serving as a cover for it all . . .Mostly what w got were
crummy textile mills that look more like jail houses than centers of manufacture,
degrading pay, filthy working conditions, child labor, stretch-out system—a life
appalling to all except the Yankee capitalists.’)
—Ben Steelman in the Wilmington, N.C., Sunday Star—News.
The efforts of James to hang on to his heritage is a compelling example of what is
going on in many communities across the country. Urban growth vs. green space is a
current crisis. Growth and progress vs. quality of life and preservation are issues that
are familiar to hall. Hunter James, a noted journalist, writes with authority and
passion on the subject.
—Paul Gibson in Bourbon Times.
Journalist Hunter James has written a lively memoir sketching his family's long history
on a farm near Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and his own challenging efforts in
recent years to restore prosperity to the worn farmhouse and surrounding streams
and fields through a series of failed endeavors that included a horse barn and a
vineyard. Vigorous language and memorable characters such as his boisterous
alcoholic grandfather and downtrodden uncle combine to bring to life the community's
Moravian origins and turbulent evolution. At times James is perhaps overly romantic
about the past and life in agriculture, but he is a skillful storyteller.
—Randall Hall in The Journal of Southern History.
"Interweaving ancestral history with current affairs, James reveals a family tree
festooned with memorable personalities; chief among them is his late paternal
grandfather--a hard-drinking, womanizing, sermonizing, irascible man who couldn't
abide pious hyocrites. Quoting one of his grandfather's acerbic pronouncements
about a man he despised, James includes the following: 'I don't guess he could help
being what he was, but he might at least have tried to show some sense of shame.'
—Tar Heel Literature
A few paragraphs from reviews of one of my civil rights books, They Didn’t put That
on the Huntley-Brinkley:
. . . Although caught up in the (civil rights) revolution, he never lost the journalist’s
impassivity that makes for accurate retelling. In fact, the stories just tell themselves.
The prose, cleanly carved into chapters that read like vignettes, essays and your
grandfather’s recollections all at once, focus on those Southerners, some famous,
some obscure, who had to learn to live together all over against between the late
1950s and 1970s . . . His comments and criticisms of Jimmy Carter, Terry Sanford,
Barry Goldwater and Jesse Jackson bear repeating for their lucidity and relevance.”
—Pam Whitfield in the Southern Pines Pilot.
“James has a sharp eye for human interest stories and a keen ear for Southern
accents. Many of the people he writes about are far more memorable than those
whose names made the headlines and, yes, than the Huntley-Brinkley report during
some momentous times in this region”
—Ann Lloyd Merriman in the Richmond Times-Dispatch
They Didn’t Put That on the Huntley-Brinkley! . . . opens up a whole new world—the
forgotten, hidden, ancient South that civil rights came to slowly, if at all (and) brings
civil rights home, right up onto the front porch.”
—Deirdre Parker Smith in The Salisbury(N.C.) Post.
Drawing on his 30 years as a reporter for Southern newspapers, James recounts
what he calls the “hidden story” of the (civil rights) movement. In an anecdotal, at
times almost conversational style, he traces the world-shaking changes of the era
through the lives of people whose coming to terms with the movement took place far
outside the glare of media struggle. By turns grave and amusing, wistful and bitterly
ironic, the book unfailingly realizes the author’s stated objective: to write “of real men
and women who almost overnight had to learn how to cope with precepts that struck a
the very foundation of their lives.
—Mark Kelly in The Birmingham News.
James is an engaging writer, with an eye for irony, a sharp ear for dialogue and a
penchant for elegiac cadences.
—Publishers Weekly.
Relations between blacks and whites are at the core of James’s writing. However,
small events and little-known people often can throw light on major social forces, and
James has a talent for capturing the telling small moment in comfortable prose
vignettes.
—Columbia State.
In Greene County neither the worst fears of whites nor the highest hopes of blacks
have been realized. Some whites have left the county, but the feared mass exodus
never happened. Economic power is still solidly in white hands, political power now in
lack. Although there has been a measure of rapprochement . . . there has been
nothing like redemption, and James makes bitter fun of some writers who wrote that
story prematurely.
—Sociologist John Shelton Reed in Reason.
James . . . operates on a sound premise: to account for changed relationship
between Southern whites and blacks. And he has a rapport with both races that
makes for some effective reporting.
—Ferrell Guillory in the Raleigh News & Observer.
James provides portraitures of some of the movement’s more prominent figure—
friends and foes—but the careers of these personalities already have been dealt with
to excess. It is James’s focus on the unknown that lends merit to this report
—Evalyne C. Robinson in the Newport News Daily Press.
This volume of American civil rights dramas that never made the front-page headlines
or the nightly TV newscasts yet are the essence of the greater struggle that produced
them should be shelved next to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. This is the
best nonfiction to come along since last year’s Young Men and Fire by Norman
Maclean.
—Rich Tramble in the Nashville Banner.
Much of the book is focused on the major journalists of the time, but the most
memorable vignettes focus on some of the characters that would be outrageous and
utterly unbelievable in fiction. Lester Maddox, for example, might shock younger
readers who have never hard of the former Georgia governor. James’s sketch of
Maddox is not revisionist. He still appears as an inveterate racist. But there’s almost
a tone of fondness, or bemusement as James recites the litany of Maddox’s
outrageous acts.
In another scene two tireless Goldwater missionaries approach James as he enjoys
and early evening bourbon at home and harass him for his liberal articles in the
newspaper. The moment is presented with the clarity and grace of a fine short story.
(The book) is very much like a short story collection—with one major difference. It is,
of course, all true.
—William McKeen, director of Department of Journalism at the University of Florida.
James’s better chapters . . . have a touch of Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell. He has
an eye for just the right descriptive detail and an ear of language that conveys
eccentricity without condescension. But he also offers a touch of Mencken: He doesn’
t allow his obvious affection for the traditional Southern lifestyle to obscure his disgust
with ignorance and suppression.
—Art Eisenstadt in the Winston-Salem Journal
Selected paragraphs from reviews of Smile Pretty and say Jesus: The Last Great
Days of PTL:
“ . . . It’s Hunter’s self-effacing and his Columbo approach that make his books work
so well, that make one more account of the mother of all tel evangelical downfalls
something special even after the scandals moldy and overdone by most news
standards . . . Hunter James’ truth is stranger and a helluva lot funnier than fiction.”
—Rheta Johnson in the Memphis Commercial Appeal.
“This is not the first book about the downfall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, and
there’s no way it will be the last. But when all the others are written, this may well be
the most entertaining and, in its own unique way, perhaps even the most insightful . . .
. James brings considerable energy to a compelling tale that is engulfed by
comic/tragic elements. And while recounting the saga of sin in the sanctuary is in
itself compelling, James infuses the story with the kind of chaotic drama that makes a
well known story fun to revisit.—Frederick Burger in The Anniston (Ala.) Star.
Smile Pretty and say Jesus has a hard gonzo edge (and) is, quite simply, a riot. It’s
also blessed with a wry, self-deprecating touch—hugely refreshing in a business
loaded with people who take everything, especially themselves, too seriously.
—Bill Morris, former columnist for the Greensboro News-Record.
“ . . . It’s Hunter’s self-effacing and his Columbo approach that make his books work
so well, that make one more account of the mother of all televangical downfalls
something special even after the scandals moldy and overdone by most news
standards . . . Hunter James’ truth is stranger and a helluva lot funnier than fiction.”
Rheta Grimsley Johnson in the Memphis Commercial Appeal.
Journalist and author Hunter James is in rare form in this, his latest published work . .
. . Smile Pretty . . . is a well-crafted, well-thought-out piece of literature. Anyone who
picks up this book merely for a look at he PTL Ministry will be pleasantly surprised;
anyone who picks up this book for a look at life will not be disappointed.
—Michael Lake in the St. Andrews Cairn.
The value of this book, for those who’ve followed the case, is on the details and
unprintable, unconfirmed gossip that created a miasma around Heritage USA . . .
(Meantime) James’ editors scream obscenities over the phone demanding he turn up
something new, something different that no one else has. He writes of his own
struggles as a 50-soimething print reporter fight for tidbits with 20-something TV
piranhas.—Deirdra Parker Smith in The Salisbury Post.
Smile Pretty) is a morality tale regarding the politics of sin and the premise that
power, no matter how heavenly its intentions, can have a tendency to corrupt. The
text is divided into three sections, which brings to mind a three-ring circus. The only
thing missing is the bad playing Send in the Clowns.
Smile Pretty and say Jesus (that’s what PTL audiences were urged to do) captures
the sideshow atmosphere surrounding the final months of (Jim and Tammy Faye
Bakker’s) tenure, and it provides some solid, detailed information on the various
warring fundamentalist sects. There are other, more straightforward accounts of the
PTL; this one is more fun to read.
—William Starr in the Columbia State.
What makes the book interesting is how James shows the cultural and theological
differences of feel-good charismatic faith and the fundamentalism of Jerry Falwell,
who took over PTL at Bakker’s request, only to be accused of trying to steal the
ministry. Another amusing sidelight is a look at some of the conspiracy theorists in
Bakker’s camp who were convinced the fall of PTL was part of Satan’s grand scheme,
involving Falwell, George Bush (the first), the Pope, druids, Ted Turner and the
Trilateral Commission.
As he documents the crash and burn of a religious empire, James also describes the
mainstream media’s absurd attempts to maintain New York Times-level respectability
in the midst of a National Enquirer-type store. James, a practiced political reporter
and editorialist on the “vagaries of human existence,” was himself reduced the level of
the media mob—spatting with TV cameramen, nearly punching out a snooty BBC
reporter, and launching a comical aquatic assault on the Bakkers’ lakefront residence.
—William C. Smith in Welcomat, Philadelphia’s weekly of diverse opinion.
This ‘ reporter’s notebook’ gives entertaining and informative insights into how the
Bakkers so effectively fleeced their flock, (into) theological distinctions between
Pentacostals and Baptist fundamentalists, (and) how the news media covered the
story and how Jrry Falwell, whatever n may think of his politics, acted with genuine
integrity in trying to straighten oout this sorry mess. James’s style is spritely, wryly
describing his first impressions of Heritage USA, remarking on “the sheer wild
trivilality of the place.” . . .
Excerpts from review of All the Forgotten Places:
“James has gotten close to his story, and told it ruthlessly—in a way that Newsweek
correspondent who visits Catalpa County in his book could not do. . . Perhaps James
could not have presented the humor pathos and complexity of his story had he been
content merely to confirm existing prejudices—whether they e those of the home folks
or those of intellectuals in some New York salon.
—Bailey Thompson in the Baton Rouge Advocate
“If anybody has asked me, I would have said I wasn’t much interested in reading
another line about the summer of 1964, when the civil rights movement reached the
boiling point in my old home state of Alabama. I would have said to my good friend
and former colleague on this newspaper, Hunter James: “Write something else,
honey.Naturally no one consults me about their magnum opuses (and I know that is
not the word) and am I glad! Hunter wrote a perfectly stunning book, and the more I
think about it the more astonished I am at that drowsy-looking fellow’s wisdom and
pure genius. I always knew he was a fine writer. But how did he know that the story
of the white people in the Alabama Black Belt needed to be set down for all time?”
—The late Celestine Sibley in The Atlanta Constitution.
Perhaps what a former newspaper colleague called James’ ‘obsession with the civil
rights days has enabled the author to bring new fruit from literary soil in need of a
fallow year or two to regain its fertility’”
—Frederick Burger in The Anniston Star.
Hunter James understands his subject well and addresses it with humor, tenderness,
respect, and nostalgia, yet with a realm with which we can identify. He captures
through his focus on one small county and on one unimportant town, the trauma of an
entire nation. So sleeps the pride of former days.”
—McCoy C. Campbell in The Chattanooga Times.
“ . . . the irony of this quietly ironic book is that the faces, the voices particularly, are
not forgotten. Nor are the myths, the scars.”
—The late Lewis Leary, Kenan professor of English at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“James has gotten close to his story, and told it ruthlessly—in a way that Newsweek
correspondent who visits Catalpa County in his book could not do. . . Perhaps James
could not have presented the humor pathos and complexity of his story had he been
content merely to confirm existing prejudices—whether they e those of the home folks
or those of intellectuals in some New York salon.
—Bailey Thompson in the Baton Rouge Advocate
“If anybody has asked me, I would have said I wasn’t much interested in reading
another line about the summer of 1964, when the civil rights movement reached the
boiling point in my old home state of Alabama. I would have said to my good friend
and former colleague on this newspaper, Hunter James: “Write something else,
honey.
“Naturally no one consults me about their magnum opuses (and I know that is not the
word) and am I glad! Hunter wrote a perfectly stunning book, and the more I think
about it the more astonished I am at that drowsy-looking fellow’s wisdom and pure
genius. I always knew he was a fine writer. But how did he know that the story of the
white people in the Alabama Black Belt needed to be set down for all time?”
—The late Celestine Sibley in The Atlanta Constitution.
“Perhaps what a former newspaper colleague called James’ ‘obsession with the civil
rights days has enabled the author to bring new fruit from literary soil in need of a
fallow year or two to regain its fertility’”
—Michael Gordon in The Anniston(Ala.) Star
The book is not a novel, but it is much more than a reporter’s journal. The characters
and events are full of life and energy, ambivalence, arbitrariness, goodness,
meanness, depth and credibility . . . James relates and describes what he sees and
hears; he does it well and with passion and . . . maintains total control of his story . . .
—Van Brown in the Wake Forest University Magazine.
. . . James is right that the least understood character in the civil rights drama of the
1960s was the small town white who wasn’t really sure what was going on nor what
was expected of him. We all know the animal sheriff and the enduring black and the
courageous white liberal. James’s book helps explain the Southerner in between.
—Theo Lippman in the Baltimore Sun.
All the Forgotten Places describes the impact of the civil rights movement on one
remote county in backcountry Alabama. But reviewers have seen it as more than
that—a story of fear and oppression, struggle and sacrifice, representative of the
movement as it took shape all across the old plantation South.
—Sid Bost in the Twin City Sentinel.
James touch for description is powerful, real, so dynamic one forgets he is reading a
book and start to feel he is hearing all of this firsthand. It’s like we are sitting there
with James in the old farm kitchens, the dusty stores and broken-down shacks.
People love each other and hate each other and need each other and watch their
world changing about them—for some too fast, for others not fast enough. We get to
know them, understand how they feel and why. There is “Little Brother,” James uncle-
in-law, who runs a store and the local post office. Some day, he hopes, President
Johnson will see the plantation families repaid for the slaves that Lincoln and the
Republicans took away. He figures (his family’s share) will come to $337,452.47,
including interest.
—Bob Ingle in the Atlanta Constitution.
All the Forgotten Places is a superb book, not an easy one to read, nor with
enjoyment save in James’s mastery of his craft. A Black Belt resident must read with
compassion and understanding and the hurt that comes through self-recognition and
remembrance. The events described therein, through people who made those events
and that time, are as clear and true a story of the civil rights struggle as will ever be
written.
—Jean Martin in The Selma (Ala.) Times-Journal.
Reading Hunter James’s book All the Forgotten Places is like running your mind over
swatches of crushed velvet. Not because of his chosen subject matter, but because
of the mastery with which he manipulates the English language to make his
characters live, his scenery vivid and vibrant, and the times of which he writes thrum a
firmly-plucked bass String—The Greene County Democrat.
James interviewed a wide cross section of people, black and white, caught the
meaning and the rhythm and color of their speech, and probed until he could get their
reactions to all the social and political changes happening in Catalpa County . . . Like
both the whites and the blacks, James has ambivalent feelings about what civil rights,
with all its marchings, speeches, demonstrations, really accomplished.
All the Forgotten Places, (is) a beautifully written story of lives set against the turmoil
of racial conflict, the tale of a place stranded on the shoals of changes. Along the
way, we learn quite a bit about the styles of life in the Black Belt, a heretofore
“forgotten place.”
—Southern Living.
What is truth? It is, in a wonderful Jamesian passage, the movement and its march,
the sheriff standing by toe supply commentary to his supporters. The ex-football star
rail(ing) at the lead marcher and his antecedents. The sheriff protests he’s
misrepresented, that he’s no head-bashing redneck. He’s wiling to see gradual,
orderly changed, he says, while he fights it tooth and nail. It’s the Biblical rhetoric of
the demonstration leader, calling for a just, fair new order, yet willing to see non-
boycotting blacks “persuaded” by his followers in violent ways, and intent himself on
holding office . . .
–Abe Jones in the Greensboro (NC) News-Record.
James has peopled his book with a colorful and varied cast of characters: Little
Brother, the aging planter who reads Tacitus while his world crumbles; the good ole
boys who find solace in hard likker; a black preacher who seeks to keep the
revolutionaries in check . . . Speculating on why a rich white man remains in Catalpa
County: “
Perhaps he had been held there by an evil magic somehow mixed up with the land
itself, something that came up from the river bottoms like a swamp fever, and got
inside a man without his knowing anything about it or even being aware of the
consequences.”
Excerpts from reviews of The Quiet People of the Land
Hunter is a journalist, but he writes like a poet. And his book is no ordinary “church
history” publication. It is history well studied and well written. He tells the story of the
Moravians in their early struggles to survive on the frontiers, their difficulties with the
Regulators and the colonial authorities of North Carolina, and their dilemma during
the Revolution when they wanted independence but were bound by their religion to
life of peace. His major point is that the experiences of the Moravians contributed
significantly to the acceptance of dissent as legitimate in North Carolina. Every North
Carolina library should have this book.
—William Burris, political science professor at Guilford College, in the North Carolina
Library Journal.
Pick up the book prepared to shed any stereotype image of the Moravians as a
collection of colorless, hymn-singing religious fanatics. These were religious
communities to be sure, and among the most fully developed sectarian communes of
the time anywhere, but they were also towns full of people: sharp traders, hotheaded
youths, hustlers, brawlers, saints and sinners . . . This is a Revolutionary War tale
told from the unique viewpoint of a community battling to keep peace, first of ll, with its
on conscience. Here are the clash of arms, the groans of the wounded, the
ceaseless tread of marching feet. But more important is the grim and deadly conflict
of ideals, the spiritual warfare, the battering of the invader at the gates of “the most
thoroughly democratic idea of all—the right of dissent.”
—Alan Willis in the late, lamented Twin City Sentinel.
James’s personal friends know that he has some sort of mystical bond to this land
and to those obscure figures whose ghosts may lurk in the hills of Bethania and
Bethabara and along Salem and Muddy creeks and perhaps even among the dusty
trucks and volumes in the Moravian archives. For the historian that’s a gift. As he
pries through yellowed manuscripts in search of personalities he feels he’s known for
a long time, we get to know them too. He writes well—smoothly, economically. He
has a splendid eye for life.
—Joe Goodman in the Winston-Salem Journal.
Excerpt from Guide to Historic Salem:
By far the greatest value of the book . . . lies in its accounts of the individual sites.
Beginning with a brief architectural description, each site is identified as to original
inhabitant, builder, date of construction, and present owner. The role which the
building played in the Salem community is discussed, when appropriate, and
subsequent ownership and architectural changes are outlined. . . Its usefulness for
the visitor to the restored museum village will be surpassed only by its value to both
casual and devoted friends of Old Salem, who now have, in readily available form, an
outline of the wealth of information available in the institution’s research files.
—J. Edwin Hendricks in the Wake Forest University Magazine.
Excerpt from review of The Candidate, The ‘Commies’ and the World’s Longest Camel:
Though set in the middle of the last century, just as we were beginning to hear the
first faint murmurs of the anti-smoking panic, this fast-aced and fact-based novel may
be more timely now than when the events it describes were taking place. It focuses
primarily on intense union-organizing activities at Tobacco Monolith RJR, with time
out for many a comic interlude and a brief romance that leaves anti-hero Ryerson
Goode in a mood of uncertain despair.
—Roy Thompson in Winston-Salem Journal.
Excerpts from reviews of Atlanta after Sherman. (verse)
James is a Southern journalist and author of non-fiction books, and his Southern
urbanite suffer from a suffocation of modern detail and they long for “other voices”
and the “old music” that can quench their spiritual dryness . . . each poem is an essay
with wings.
—Jon Obermeyer in Greensboro News & Record.
Hunter James . . . creates a new view of life in the South after the Civil War. It is
written in a number of voices—critical, satirical, ironic, humorous, and angry by turns
(or at the same time.)
—Clark Cox in Richmond County Daily Journal.
Yet after all the finereviews we are obliged, as in so many instances, to remember
Faulkner: The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to
be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read
reviews.
