Mr. Footes writing is marvelously exact and positive. His attitude toward his people is respectful and human, as though he had thought about them a great deal and knew too much about them to take them for granted.New Yorker

This audiobook benefits from Tom Parkerss exquisite narration.He becomes the voices of the South and provides a strong accompaniment to Footes fine prose.AudioFile

Before Shelby Foote undertook his epic history of the Civil War, he wrote this fictional chroniclea landscape in narrativeof Jordan County, Mississippi, a place where the traumas of slavery, war, and Reconstruction are as tangible as rock formations. The seven stories in Jordan County move backward in time, from 1950 to 1797, and through the lives of characters as diverse as a black horn player doomed by tuberculosis and convulsive jealousy, a tormented and ineffectual fin-de-siecle aristocrat, and a half-wild frontiersman who builds a plantation in Choctaw territory only to watch it burn at the close of the Civil War. In prose of almost biblical gravity and with a deep knowledge of the ways in which history shapes human lives-and sometimes warps them beyond repairFoote gives us an ambitious, troubling work of fiction that builds on the traditions of William Faulkner and Flannery OConnor but that is resolutely unique.

Shelby Foote comes from a long line of Mississippians. He was born in Greenville, and attended school there until he entered the University of North Carolina. During World War II he served in the European theater as a captain of field artillery. He has written six novels—Tournament, Shiloh, Love in a Dry Season, Follow Me Down, Jordan County and September September. He was awarded three Guggenheim fellowships in the twenty-year course of writing his monumental three-volume history The Civil War: A Narrative.

Tom Parker, recipient of the Golden Voice award, records a remarkable variety of books while pursuing his love of theater by directing two or three professional stage productions a year in the Washington, D.C., area.