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Gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson’s drug-fueled, wild run through the American cultural landscape ended seven years ago on Feb. 20 when he shot himself through the head in the style of his idol, Ernest Hemingway. North Carolina native Margaret A. Harrell of Raleigh hung with him for part of the ride.

She recounts her adventure in “Keep This Quiet! My Relationship with Hunter S. Thompson, Milton Klonsky, and Jan Mensaert” (Saeculum University Press: Sibiu, Romania, and Raleigh: 2011; 258 pages, softcover, $17.95).

She had an affair with Thompson. She carried on purely platonic relationships with Klonsky and Mensaert, she says. The attraction with them was intellectual and artistic, she says. Well, OK.

Why write about a fling with Thompson? Because I’m still unsure, it’s best to let Harrell tell you: “A few weeks later hearing CNN announce his suicide, I watched my feelings. Not crushed. I felt the dream atmosphere rise up, that it was all right, and I began to hear in my head: ‘Please don’t let me be misunderstood.’ It was about at that moment I acquired the sharp intention to write this book.”

Klonsky, older, was a poet and scholar in Greenwich Village, where Harrell lived. She met Mensaert, a troubled artist and poet in Morocco, in an extended solo trip to Europe and North Africa. Through Klonsky, she met the actor Rip Torn, the novelist Norman Mailer, a girlfriend of Marlon Brando and other New York celebrities.

Gonzo journalism, lest we forget, was the term Thompson adopted for his type of subjective reporting. He put himself at the center of his stories or never far from it. In his heyday, the late ‘60s and ‘70s, his comic approach breathed fresh air into the reporting of the day.

Harrell met Thompson when she worked as a copy editor for Random House in New York. A native of Greenville, she was in her mid-20s, having recently graduated from Duke magna cum laude with a degree in history. She lets you know, too, that she was a looker, red-haired with a dancer’s body. Photographs in the book back her up.

Some time after Harrell began editing Thompson’s first book, “Hell’s Angels,” he became aware, through an attorney, that he was dealing with an attractive young woman rather than a dumpy fussbucket. She was in New York; he, San Francisco and Colorado.

The memoir is curiously constructed. It’s driven by letters. Harrell saved all correspondence from Thompson. Well, she would have as part of her job in that pre-email era. Most of the letters, it seems, deal with his forthcoming book. It was an account of roughly one year he spent with the notorious motorcycle gang in San Francisco and Oakland, Calif. In today’s terms, he was an embedded reporter.

Years ago, when I read “Hell’s Angels,” I wondered how Thompson had managed to gain entry into the gang. He rode with them and partied with them. Harrell tells how he did it, well, she might not be the first. An ever growing industry of published Thompson memorabilia keeps showing up these days of which her memoir is a small part. “Outlaw Journalist” by William McKeen comes to mind. It was published in 2008. But I read of his introduction into the gang in her book first.

A San Francisco Examiner police reporter, who was a former Hell’s Angel, introduced Thompson to his old friends and vouched for him. (This was the time before newspapers put on coats and ties and tried to look respectable). The gang was aware that Thompson was writing a book about them. The book created a stir and received good reviews in the national press.

How torrid this affair was is hard to say. Harrell is circumspect with details almost to the point of primness. For the most part, she sticks to the letters. He comes across as a self-centered complainer and whiner, a real pain for a publisher. She says Thompson was never drugged out in her presence. She does recall a “marijuana cigarette” being passed around once.

For a former Random House editor, the memoir, in spots, has an oddly amateurish tone. Marijuana cigarette? A second example: “We’d been thrust together at a monumental time. What’s more, told to go through this together, it was paid for and required. What would happen when we actually met?”

Another: “How was I going to explain? Egads. Hunter screamed at the drop of a pin. But never at me.” Egads?

On page 146, somebody missed a typo in Bennet Cerf’s name. He was the big cheese at Random House. Good material abounds in this memoir. Somewhere among these letters lies a better book.
 

In William Faulkner’s novel, “Absalom, Absalom,” a Canadian says to his college roommate from Mississippi: “Talk about the South.”

Two recently published books talk about it in depth and they talk about it well, revealing surprising facts and insights.

A UNCG graduate, Karen Cox, who is now on the faculty of UNC-Charlotte, shows in “Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture” (UNC Press, Chapel Hill; 2011, 224 pages, hardcover $34.95) how cultural forces outside the region created and romanticized it in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Jennifer Rae Greeson, a Duke graduate on the University of Virginia faculty, builds a case in “Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature” (Harvard University Press: Cambridge and London; 2010, 356 pages, hardcover GET PRICE) for how the South was central to the conception of an expanding United States from its founding to the early 20th century even as it was a distinctive “other” in the culture and a sideshow in its politics and economy.

The South, both say, is more than a place defined by climate and geography; it’s a cultural construct. As such, it has served the nation since its founding in surprising ways. For instance, Greeson says it helped shape how we came to think of what it means to be an American. Cox points out that the South since the Civil War has been a great marketing tool.

Cox says Southerners didn’t define the South in popular culture. Yankees did. When you think about it, this is obvious. The book and magazine publishing industry is New York City, Boston, Philadelphia. Movies are made in California. The giant advertising agencies are New York and Chicago. Tin Pan Alley and Broadway? New York City. Radio and TV networks? You get the picture.

The North defined the South to address a cultural need, Cox says. What was the need? Escapism. A way to vent the tensions and frustrations of modernism as the country changed from a rural society to an industrial one, she says. Rural people were displaced and crowded into dirty, crime-ridden cities across the Northeast and Midwest.

The South created in popular culture – minstrel shows, novels, magazines, movies, music, advertising, radio and TV – was preindustrial. Full of moonlight and magnolias, it was gracious living at a slower pace in a bucolic setting. Think “Gone With the Wind.” When the novel hit the stores, it was marketed as an accurate picture of the ante-bellum South, the literal truth about happy days on the plantation.

In this construct, which began to unravel only with the advent of the civil rights movement, African Americans were subservient to whites. Minstrel shows performed by whites in blackface created racial stereotypes that became strongly ingrained in popular culture. Stock characters such as “Jim Crow” and “Zip Coon” became standard depictions of blacks in movies, radio and eventually, television.

The most popular radio show of all time, “Amos ‘n Andy,” an NBC comedy about blacks in Chicago, was based on minstrel stereotypes, she notes. Interestingly, she points out that Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, the white performers who created the show, met in Durham. Annoying, she gives no further details about this meeting.

The J. Walter Thompson advertising agency made Aunt Jemima Pancake Flour “the most recognizable icon of American advertising in the twentieth century,” Cox writes. “The black mammy and uncle caricatures appealed to white consumers nationwide, because the image often conveyed blacks as loyal employees who willingly too care of their white employers.”

This racial stereotyping in popular cultured hindered race relations in the country and helped institutionalize racism in the culture, Cox says.

White Southerners didn’t escape stereotyping in novels, movies and music either. The lazy, ignorant, moonshine-swilliing hillbilly was created. Southern white women, by and large, were portrayed as genteel and subservient to the man of the house, er, plantation.

The popular television series, “The Beverly Hillbillies,” carried the stereotype forward into the 1960s. The notion of passive femininity, women as objects for men to admire, was used by advertising agencies to sell skin creams, lotions, shampoos and all manner of beauty products.

This is an easily accessible, eye-opening and richly documented study. What really sets the book off are the advertisements, photographs, sheet music and movie stills that she has uncovered and included.

Greeson’s book is not an easy read but it is the more provocative. It burrows deeply into American political and literary culture, which she argues are closely bound. This is a heavyweight of a study, impressively learned and exhaustively researched.

She puts it this way: “I do not ask what the South is; rather I ask what it is good for, what it accomplishes and enables in the broader culture of the United States.”

If there is a short answer to her question, it goes something like this summation from the introduction: “As an internal other from the start of U.S. existence, it (the South) lies simultaneously inside and outside the national imaginary constructed in U.S. literature. Our South thus serves in that literature as an unparalleled site of connection between “the United States” and what lies outside it – a connection to the larger world, to Western history, to a guilty colonial past and a desired and feared imperial future.”

Got it? This is not to be dismissive. You need to come to this book with considerable background. I don’t have it but you sense this is an important book.

Fred Hobson, the noted scholar of the South at UNC, writes “This is one of the most insightful works of Southern literary and intellectual history of the past two decades – and its significance transcends the U.S. South.”

Well, I’m not going to argue with him.

What are social conventions and rules for? To be broken, say the characters in a high-spirited but pointed novel by North Carolina native Kat Meads.

“When the dust finally settles” (Ravenna Press: Spokane, Wash.; 2011, 165 pages, softcover, $12.95) is set in fictional Mawatuck County in coastal northeastern North Carolina, an isolated corner just below the Virginia line. The year is 1968. A tidal wave called desegregation has breached the high school, spilling into the county. The principal narrator is a dead man, killed by a tractor.

Meads grew up on a farm in Currituck County. She is the author of a wonderful story collection, “Little Pockets of Alarm” and other books of fiction, plays, nonfiction and poetry that include “The Invented Life of Kitty Duncan,” “Sleep,” “Born Southern and Restless” and “Not Waving.”

She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo and the Millay Colony. She holds an undergraduate degree in psychology from UNC-Chapel Hill and an MFA from UNCG. She lives in California where she works as alumni editor for Washington Square, a publication of San Jose State University. She’s the real deal. Her work deserves wider readership. She is scheduled to give a reading at UNCG on March 29.

Several characters narrate the overlapping story lines in this novel. Meads nails the voices. This is eastern North Carolina talking. The speech is earthy and concrete. After fainting, an old woman is “watered and breezed.” Two IRS agents look “as serious as saw blades.” The novel is worth reading for the dialogue alone.

It offers more than talk, though. The novel attacks staleness. Southern fiction often gets mired in mud holes of stereotypes. This story splashes through them like an open-throttled John Deere.

A deputy sheriff is kind, understanding, reasonable and humane. A black high school basketball star is tentative and unsure of himself. A small community welcomes change, though not with wide open arms. It’s not easy. Change never is.

Humor fills the pages. Characters flaunt laws, rules and conventions. In one scene, a taxpayer’s revolt takes a character to the roof of the post office where he shoots starlings with a shotgun. That adds fuel to another rebellion, son against father. Scene after scene is built like this, rebellion meeting a countervailing force, cascading through the narrative.

When family and land are involved, sons, grandchildren, grandparents, parents, recognize no barrier to protect them. Friends claw and fight for friends, regardless of the social conventions of race in this time and place. Loyalty is a big deal in this book.

The pace is fast but you don’t get lost. Clarence the talking corpse clarifies what’s going on by filling in gaps, explaining motives, pointing out somebody’s strengths and weaknesses. It’s a good device because it works. His recalled antics as a delinquent taxpayer battling the federal government help drive the story. Like Hamlet, method propels his madness.

The novel opens as bored high school seniors loll about a hot gym for graduation practice. White is everywhere, skin, shoes, shirts, dresses. Tensions and rebellions quickly surface over race, gender and authority. Throughout the novel, big scenes are graduations. How about childhood to maturity? Life to death? It’s a funny novel that bites.

What’s wrong with it? Not a lot. Some sentences are obscure. They require a rereading or two. The difficulty usually comes from the speech pattern that Meads captures. So, this is a minor complaint.

One character, the sister of Clarence, seems a bit overdrawn, bordering on stereotype. But she’s largely a foil and loyalty – of a sort – personified.

This is a brash, fresh and richly imagined story.

The Haw and the Altamaha are two rivers that sound as if they might be cousins, sharing common traits such as arms and mouths. But they aren’t and they don’t.

Both, though, are the subject of recent books. Anne Melyn Cassebaum, a retired Elon University professor, is the author of “Down Along the Haw: The History of a North Carolina River” (McFarland & Co.: Jefferson and London; 2011, 240 pages, soft cover, $29.95). Janisse Ray, poet and environmentalist, is the author of “Drifting into Darien: A Personal and Natural History of the Altamaha River (University of Georgia Press: Athens; 2011, 256 pages, hard cover, $22.95).

The Haw rises as a seep in a Forsyth County woods near the intersection of Stigall Road and N.C. 150. It follows the slant of the land into Rockingham County, crosses a corner of Guilford County before traversing Alamance County into Chatham. It’s impounded in Jordon Lake, an important water supply for the Triangle.

Each of the two rivers in South Georgia, the Oconee and the Ocmulgee, that join to form the Altamaha, are bigger than the Haw. The Altamaha is a giant from the start, wide and deep.

The Haw runs 110 miles before it joins the Deep River to form the Cape Fear in Chatham County. The Altamaha cuts diagonally across the bottom third of Georgia, running 137 miles.

The Haw is a Piedmont river, filled with rocks and rapids, shooting its way through the rolling landscape. The Altamaha is a swampy coastal plains river, flowing slowly to the Georgia coast at St. Simons Island.

Interstate-40 crosses the Haw between Greensboro and Burlington. Interstate-95 crosses the Altamaha west of Darien, where it breaks into several channels forming Cathead Creek and the Butler, Champney and Darien rivers.

Both authors set about their books in much the same way, float trips from headwaters to end. Cassebaum used a canoe; Ray, a kayack. Each shared a similar purpose – a call to arms to save a threatened river. Yet the results are different in depth and tone.

Early in her book, Cassebaum is exploring on foot, with her dog Crook, a shallow, swampy area of the Haw in the vicinity of Oak Ridge. She watches two men approach. They live nearby. They had noticed her car parked on the shoulder of the road.
They tell her she should have asked for permission to be on the land.

‘“You should for your own protection.”’’

‘“I don’t know if you notice we come armed.’ Then I do notice the holster.” she writes. A recent robbery and shooting had them on edge.

On the first page of her book, Ray also recounts an encounter on a riverbank. She and her husband pull up at McRae’s Landing deep in South Georgia. Two men are hoisting a motor from a truck.

Her husband, Raven, always likes her to do the talking in situations where a Southern accent might head off any unpleasantness. She rolls down the window.

‘ “Howdy! Y’all seen any canoers this morning?’ “

That’s a key difference in these two fine books. Ray is a born and bred member of the river culture about which she writes and celebrates. Cassebaum, although she has lived near the Haw for more than 25 years, isn’t. She brings an urban and academic mindset to the Haw, shying away from sharing much of her personal life.

The book titles tell you of the different approaches. Cassebaum’s is a history; Ray’s a personal and natural history. Ray has written a much warmer and engaging book, and it is just as fact-filled and outraged as Cassebaum’s.

Curiously, a small unincorporated community near the Haw is named Altamahaw. It makes you wonder if there is a lost tribal connection between the two rivers. The rivers, though, are wildly different both physically and how people have used them.

Not so long ago, the Haw might have been the most polluted river in North Carolina. People couldn’t swim in it and neither could fish. Stretches of it could be blue one day and red the next. It stank. The water was toxic.

The Haw is the home of the Southern textile industry. Two mills began operating around 1880, a quarter mile apart. One was on the Haw in Alamance County, and the other on Reedy Fork Creek, a tributary of the Haw, Cassebaum writes.

Cassebaum at times interweaves the present with the past and the narrative sometimes gets a bit confusing. I’m not sure, for instance, of the name of the first textile mill, and I’d like to know. Maybe it’s in here somewhere, but that fact didn’t pop out at me. Anyway, the Haw quickly became in Cassebaum’s words “a cotton mill river.”

The gradient of the Haw was ideal for harnessing the river with dams to run the mills. Rapids on the Haw early on were referred to as “powers” and grist mills and sawmills dotted its banks before textiles arrived. The Haw watershed has an estimated 165 dams and the Haw itself is dammed in a number of places.

The dams and the textile mills ruined the water quality of the Haw. Today, though, stretches of the Haw are safe for swimming. Fish and other river life have returned. The federal Clean Water Act and the Haw River Assembly, which has its office on the banks of the Haw in Bynum, are largely responsible for the improvements. Cassebaum is an active member of the assembly.

The Altamaha, deep in rural Georgia, has never been dammed. It’s the largest undammed river in the Southeast, and perhaps the East Coast. The wild and sparsely populated landscape that it winds through has saved it from being dammed, Ray says.

But, like the Haw, it’s experiencing water quality degradation through runoff – nonpoint pollution – due to the destruction of the watershed forests that once protected it. This is a type of pollution extremely difficult to control. Along the Haw, housing developments are a big source of nonpoint pollution.

Again, like the Haw, the Altamaha has friends such as the Nature Conservancy, which is buying up land to protect the watershed.

Neither river, though, is out of the woods yet as these two books so solidly and eloquently document.

Effects of the explosive growth are already visible. Drive the clogged I-40 that swings by the Research Triangle Park. Follow the bitter fight for control of the Wake County school board. Note that each summer seems to bring a water shortage.

For William M. Rohe, professor and director of the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, the place is a lab where you can watch and cringe at how the public and private sectors try to get a handle on the consequences of rapid urban growth.

Rohe recounts the area’s history, development and prospects in his new book, “The Research Triangle: From Tobacco Road to Global Prominence.” While plodding in places, the narrative for the most part is highly readable, accessible to everybody, including academics.

At roughly 50 years old, the Triangle is a youngster as far as U.S. metropolitan areas go. In the past two decades, it’s gone on a growth spurt. “In 1960 the combined population of the Raleigh and Durham metropolitan statistical areas was 238,000; by 2009 it was almost 1.7 million,” Rohe notes. “Between 2000 and 2009 the Raleigh-Cary metropolitan area was the second fastest growing in the country.”

Unlike Atlanta or Boston, the Triangle did not spring from a core city. This has given it an unusual character. It’s a sprawling, low-density urban space with a hollow core. The forested Research Triangle Park is the core as well as the motor that drives the growth.

The Triangle didn’t happen because it sat on a major river, deep harbor, or mountain pass. A few far-sighted people – Greensboro resident Romeo Guest was among the first – recognized that the area had resources equally advantageous – three major research universities.

Guest’s company worked with textile firms moving to the state from New England. In 1954, Rohe writes, he seized upon the idea of using the Triangle universities to recruit research centers to North Carolina. He met with the dean of the School of Textiles at N.C. State and others in the industry. Soon, a delegation was formed to take the idea to Gov. Luther Hodges. He liked it, and an effort to get it off the ground began in earnest.

The Triangle is the result of long-range, collaborative public and private planning. It’s a thriving demonstration of how government, higher education and the private sector can work together to enrich lives and boost a poor state. No other urban area in the country is quite like it.

“The pivotal year for the Research Triangle Park was 1965,” Rohe writes. Gov. Terry Sanford announced in January that the now named National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences would move to the park. This was a huge plum, sought by 46 states.

“The fact that Governor Sanford was one of the first southern politicians to support the candidacy of John Kennedy for president and that former Governor Luther Hodges was the sitting Secretary of Commerce certainly had something to do with this decision,” Rohe writes. By the end of the 1960s, 21 companies had committed to build research centers in the park, including IBM. Recruiters for the park had courted it for seven years.

By 2007 (Rohe’s latest figures), the park was made up of 6,971 acres, a rectangle 8 miles long and 2 miles wide. In the center of a scalene triangle anchored by N.C. State, Duke and UNC, It housed 157 companies and other organizations, employing 39,000 people. It’s a high technology hot spot. It gave the area a metropolitan identity, Rohe says.

The park, though, is beginning to show its age. It was designed in the 1950s, and the planners took the idea of “park” to heart. The research campuses are self-contained in a bucolic setting, Rohe notes. “More recent trends, at least in selected knowledge-based businesses, have shifted toward encouraging more interaction and collaboration among employees of different companies, and providing them with dense, diverse, and vibrant environments in which to both work and live. ...”

While growing fast, the Triangle has yet to reach the tipping point that would justify the expansion of daily West Coast and international flights from the Raleigh-Durham airport. “This undoubtedly discourages companies and residents who regularly fly to West Coast and international destinations from moving to the area,” Rohe says. Other areas of the country now regularly send their economic development recruiters to the park and Triangle to lure away companies.

Still, job growth, moderate cost-of-living, and high quality of life attract people to the Triangle from across the country and beyond. “Recent growth is centered in Wake and Johnston Counties with Chatham and Franklin Counties coming on strong.” Rohe says. The fast growth strains infrastructure – roads, schools, water supply – and social cohesiveness. It’s a metro area that still, in a lot of ways, doesn’t behave like one. It doesn’t speak with one voice, and the towns, cities and counties that make it up often don’t pursue the same goals.

The Triangle has changed politically, too. Democratic Party dominance began to weaken in the 1960s with the advent of the civil rights movement. Today, “clear differences in party affiliation exist between the Triangle’s eastern and western sides,” Rohe says. “In the east, Johnston and Wake Counties have the highest percentages of Republicans, while in the west, Durham, Person and Orange have the highest percentages of Democrats.” The federal government defines the Triangle as a seven-county area.

This is a solidly researched study, and thoughtful in it’s analysis. Rohe lays out where the Triangle is, how it got there, and the directions it could go. The area still has a chance to save itself, he says.

The Triangle’s biggest challenge is one that most areas would love to deal with – how to manage the fast growth that threatens to erode the quality of life the area enjoys.

To meet the challenge, Rohe says, the Triangle leadership and residents must first identify more strongly with the entire metropolitan area. They all live together in a new urban space whether they like it or not.