COLUMN: New arrivals for aspiring web writers

The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World, by Chris Barr

From Yahoo!, a leader in online content and one of the most visited Internet destinations in the world, comes the definitive reference on the essential elements of Web style for writers, editors, bloggers, and students. With topics that range from the basics of grammar and punctuation to Web-specific ways to improve your writing, this comprehensive resource will help you to shape your text for online reading, construct clear and compelling copy, write eye-catching and effective headings, develop your site's unique voice, streamline text for mobile users, optimize WebPages to boost your chances of appearing in search results, create better blogs and newsletters, learn easy fixes for your writing mistakes and write clear user-interface text.

The Gregg Reference Manual, by William A. Sabin

In spite of what you see on the web, in the newspapers and in letters you receive today, standards of correct writing and speaking do still exist. The 11th edition of The Gregg Reference Manual has been revised and enhanced to satisfy the continually evolving demands of business and academic writers.

The Nonstop Garden: a Step-by-Step Guide to Smart Plant Choices and Four-Season Designs, by Stephanie Cohen and Jennifer Benner

The Nonstop Garden gives gardeners all the information they need to create a productive, beautiful garden from the ground up. This easy-to-use guide is split into four main parts: the nuts and bolts of designing a mixed garden, the garden's main attractions (trees and shrubs), the garden's supporting cast (bulbs, annuals, edibles, and vines), and finishing touches (ornamentation, containers, and garden structures).

"The Nonstop Garden" also includes ten fail-safe design plans that can be incorporated into any garden. Gardeners can choose from a native garden, a scented garden, a gold-colored garden, a garden for wet sites, a vibrant-colored garden, a cool-colored garden, a winter garden, a shade garden, and a design plan for the daunting area known as the hellstrip. 

Building a better, smarter garden has never been so much fun.

Gardening Notes for South Carolina, by The Columbia Garden Club

Designed as a handbook for beginners and intermediate gardeners, Gardening Notes for South Carolina includes expert advice on planting and maintaining gardens in the unique conditions of the Palmetto State. The volume fosters beautification and conservation through education and encouragement harvested from the diverse members of the Columbia Garden Club. This illustrated guide offers specific tips for planting by season as well as details on cultivating perennials, annuals, trees, and lawns. Additional sections address the basics of soil analysis, heirloom plants, container gardening, landscape design, and attracting and discouraging animals in your garden.

The second edition of this popular volume has been updated with new information on working with tomatoes, tropicals, hydrangeas, palms, ferns, and citrus trees as well as new sections on coastal gardening and water gardens.

The Food, Folklore, and Art of Lowcountry Cooking, by Joseph E. Dabney

This is the perfect book for Southerners, history lovers, and foodies alike. Discover the secrets of one of the most mysterious, romantic regions in the South: the Lowcountry. This is a celebration of the foods, history, and romance handed down to low country folks from England, Africa, the Caribbean, France, Germany and Scotland. Author Joe Dabney won the James Beard Cookbook of the Year Award for this gem.  Packed with history, authoritative folklore, photographs, and fascinating sidebars, Dabney takes readers on a tour of the Coastal Plain, including Charleston, Savannah, and Beaufort, the rice plantations, and the sea islands. Traditional recipes include Benne Seed Biscuits, Sweet Potato Pie, Frogmore Stew, She Crab Soup, Brunswick Stew, Hoppin' John, Oyster Purlo, Cooter Soup, Hags Head Cheese Goobers, and much more!

Never Been a Time: the 1917 Race Riot that sparked the Civil Rights Movement, by Harper Barnes

In the 1910s, half a million African Americans moved from the impoverished rural South to booming industrial cities of the North in search of jobs and freedom from Jim Crow laws. But Northern whites responded with rage, attacking blacks in the streets and laying waste to black neighborhoods in a horrific series of deadly race riots that broke out in dozens of cities across the nation, including Philadelphia, Chicago, Tulsa, Houston, and Washington, D.C. In East St. Louis, Illinois, corrupt city officials and industrialists had openly courted Southern blacks, luring them North to replace striking white laborers. This tinderbox erupted on July 2, 1917 into what would become one of the bloodiest American riots of the World War era. Its impact was enormous. "There has never been a time when the riot was not alive in the oral tradition," remarks Professor Eugene Redmond. Indeed, prominent blacks like W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Josephine Baker were forever influenced by it.

Celebrated St. Louis journalist Harper Barnes has written the first full account of this dramatic turning point in American history, decisively placing it in the continuum of racial tensions flowing from Reconstruction and as a catalyst of civil rights action in the decades to come. Drawing from accounts and sources never before utilized, Harper Barnes has crafted a compelling and definitive story that enshrines the riot as an historical rallying cry for all who deplore racial violence.

Freedom Summer: The savage season the made Missisippi burn and made America a Democracy, by Bruce Watson

This is a magnificent history of the summer of '64, which forever changed race relations in America.  With the civil rights movement stalled, seven hundred college students descended on Mississippi to register black voters, teach in Freedom Schools, and live in sharecroppers' shacks. But by the time their first night in the state had ended, three volunteers were dead, black churches had burned, and America had a new definition of freedom.
This remarkable chapter in American history, the basis for the controversial film "Mississippi Burning," is now the subject of Bruce Watson's thoughtful and riveting historical narrative.

Using in-depth interviews with participants and residents, Watson brilliantly captures the tottering legacy of Jim Crow in Mississippi and the chaos that brought such national figures as Martin Luther King Jr. and Pete Seeger to the state. Freedom Summer presents finely rendered portraits of the courageous black citizens-and Northern volunteers, who refused to be intimidated in their struggle for justice, and the white Mississippians who would kill to protect a dying way of life. Few books have provided such an intimate look at race relations during the deadliest days of the Civil Rights movement.