Book sense for the soul: two Mississippi authors aim to inspire and encourage readers. (Home Pages).

In this age of hustle and hurry, everybody is looking for a little healing ointment for the soul. Increasingly, we are seeking that advice and counsel from bookstores, which offer large sections of inspirational and motivational material. Two Jackson-area women, Janie Walters and Linda Rogers McGehee, have each written a book which will comfort, uplift, and encourage the reader.

McGehee, a writer and landscape designer, wrote Shadow on the Rainbow, which tells of a friend's losing battle with cancer. In addition to acting as a catharsis for her own grief, Linda wanted to pass on the lessons she learned from this traumatic experience. "That's why I included a study guide at the end of the story which will work for individuals or for groups," Linda explains.

Walters, an award-winning educator, motivational speaker, and founder of Champion Communications, collected "101 ways to reduce stress and add fun to your life" into a book called Blow a Bubble Not a Gasket. "My ultimate goal for this book," Walters says, "is that it will be a blessing to someone-a gift given to them at a time when they need encouragement the most."

While Walters' book is a light-hearted blueprint for stress relief, McGehee deals with our deepest fears and doubts, and our most complex emotions. Using pseudonyms, she tells the story of Ruth, who came to North Church in Jackson in 1991 as an associate minister. Although the Southern Baptist Convention does not endorse the hiring of women for the ministry, it recognizes the autonomy of each church. North Church, which has a reputation for openness, was free to hire Ruth.

Ruth came to Jackson from the hills of Tennessee via East Tennessee State University and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. If that girl from Stoney Creek was intimidated by the affluent, sophisticated congregation in Jackson's Eastover, she did not show it. On her first Sunday at North Church, she marched down the aisle in her black robe and white, open-toed sandals--before Easter!

Very soon, Ruth won the hearts of the entire membership at North Church with her intelligence, humor, and candor. She also developed a circle of close friends that included Linda McGehee. "Our backgrounds are not the same," Linda writes of Ruth, "but I just got to tell you, we were both cut out from damaged goods." It is this refreshing honesty that endears both the author and her subject to the reader.

Only two years after she came to Jackson, Ruth received the devastating news that she was ill with a particularly aggressive type of leukemia. After chemotherapy and radiation failed to stop the progression of the disease, Ruth was given one last chance for survival. She went to Atlanta to receive a bone marrow transplant. When her body turned on the transplanted marrow-graft versus host disease-Ruth and her family and friends and the congregation at North Church were forced to accept that, short of a miracle, they were losing Ruth.

McGehee and the church came to know and admire Ruth's Tennessee family as they struggled together to make Ruth's last days comfortable. "Ruth's mountain family speaks in a poetic tone that one doesn't often hear," McGehee says. "The title of the book, Shadow on the Rainbow, comes from something Ruth told us when she had one week left to live. I felt absolutely driven to write this story by all the beauty strength, and mystery of her family's reactions and ways of expressing their emotions. They use powerful phrases in a way that seems so natural and honest, like her mother saying, 'Sin is like soot on snow."'

As the band of friends worked to make Ruth's final days as comfortable as possible, "amazing things happened," says McGehee. "Some were downright funny, others more painful than a person ought to have to bear." Ruth, who prayed for a miracle, told her devoted friends, "This is my challenge." When Ruth's miracle failed to materialize, it became McGehee's challenge to restore her own faith and tell Ruth's story. "I was determined to learn from all this pain and use it to help others," McGehee says. "Ruth would have liked that."

While McGehee's book was born out of a painful personal experience, Brandon's Janie Walters' entire career has been aimed at educating and motivating people to a more satisfying level of achievement. Blow a Bubble Not a Gasket is a compilation of the lessons she has learned and put into use in her own life. The book is written in five easy-to-read sections that address the physical, social, mental, emotional, and spiritual areas of daily living. Each short chapter within those sections offers an antidote to stress by replacing it with fun.

Walters recounts a shopping trip with a friend: "...we walked by a toy store. I casually asked if she wanted to go in, and she replied, 'No. We don't need toys.' I was stopped in my tracks by the thought, 'With the stressful schedules and challenges of our jobs, no two people ever needed to play more than we!' So in we went."

For adding zest to your life, Walters offers simple, easy-to-perform suggestions such as "Sip from crystal glasses" and "Reminisce...and laugh as you go." In the chapter on Physical Fun, she advises: Monkey around; Rearrange your furniture; Cheer the home team.

Need some good advice? Monkey around at the book store, give a gift to yourself, and then settle down and read these two excellent books. While they are very different in style and subject, the messages of these books reinforce each other. Both Shadow on the Rainbow and Blow a Bubble Not a Gasket motivate the reader toward a more spiritually healthy life.

SHADOW ON THE RAINBOW

By Linda Rogers McGehee. Paperback, $15.00. Smith & Helwys, 800/747-3016, www.helwys.com.

BLOW A BUBBLE NOT A GASKET

By Janie Walters. Paperback, $8.95. Quail Ridge Press, 800/343-1583, www.quailridge.com.

More Mississippi Musings

STORIES FROM WHERE WE LIVE--THE GULF COAST

Edited by Sara St. Antoine. Hardcover, $19.95. Milkweed Editions, 800/520-6455, ext. 560.

"The Gulf Coast is a region of storytellers," editor Sara St. Antoine writes in the forward to this collection of stories, poems, and essays. "And if you listen closely to them, you'll hear more than just riveting narratives... (they) fill their tales with information and reflections on the world around them."

Some of the South's best tales are combined here in a delightfully varied anthology containing the legends and lore of states from Texas to Florida. The book is intended for young readers ages 9 and up, aiming to connect them to their local heritage in the way that stories passed from generation to generation used to do. The book is the fourth in a series of anthologies focused on different parts of the country, each combining literature with ecology, history, and travel.

Included are works from some of the South's most acclaimed authors, including Zora Neale Hurston, Barry Hannah, E.O. Wilson, Joseph Bruchac, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Hannah leads off the book with "A Creature in the Bay of St. Louis," a remembrance of a childhood coastal fishing excursion and a harrowing encounter with a mysterious and mighty fish that got away. In "The Singing River," Sylvia B. Williams of West Point recounts an old Indian legend that explains the unusual sounds that emanate from the Pascagoula River. As the legend goes, members of the Pascagoula tribe walked bravely to their deaths in the river, singing and chanting, rather than be killed or captured by their rivals, the Biloxi. "The Alligator and the Hunter," a story passed down by Mississippi's Chocktaw Indians about hunting deer responsibly, is the contribution of Bruchac, who has written more than 50 books for adults and children. And every true Southerner can relate to "Mosquito Blues," Dorothy Shawhan's essay on the trials of liv ing among "tiny, two-winged whiner(s)."

The book's stories are divided into four categories: "Adventures," "Great Places," "Reapers and Sowers," and "Wild Lives." A helpful appendix includes information on the region's habitats, plants, animals, and climate, along with a list of natural areas to visit. Detailed black and white illustrations are sprinkled throughout the book.

Teachers interested in using the book in their lessons can access a companion teaching and activity guide from the publisher's website at www.worldashome.org.

THE LITTLE FRIEND

By Donna Tartt. Hardcover, $26.00. Alfred A. Knopf, 800/733-3000, www.aaknopf.com.

Born and raised in the Delta, Donna Tartt knows a thing or two about small-town Mississippi life. While her first novel, the 1992 best-seller The Secret History, was about as far removed from this world as it could be--set at a small liberal arts college in Vermont--Tartt returns to the place of her childhood with this long-anticipated follow-up. The Little Friend, which takes place in the fictional Mississippi town of Alexandria, tells the story of Harriet Cleve Dusfresnes, a 12-year-old girl obsessed with tracking down the killer of her brother Robin, who was found hanging from a tree in their backyard when Harriet was just a baby. Robin has become almost a mythical figure to Harriet, and the imaginative girl is determined to exact revenge on his murderer. Her best friend Hely is her sidekick on this quest, but the two soon realize they may be in over their heads. The book also weaves together a fascinating tale of family dynamics, as Harriet is surrounded by people like her mother, still not recovered from Robin's death, and eccentric aunts who add their own bizarre flavor to the girl's everyday life.

The Mississippi Delta setting also becomes as much a character in the story as any person. Harriet's everyday existence is filled with little touches that don't go unappreciated by the discerning Southern reader: crape myrtle trees, screen doors, hunting camps, country club swimming pools, and cane-pole fishing.

As did Tartt's first work, The Little Friend has turned the heads of critics. The New York Times called the book "remarkably powerful," while Vanity Fair said the tale was "mesmerizing... rich with both intellectual and narrative wallop." At 555 pages, the book is sweeping and broad, but the story it contains manages to be personal and close to home.

DOC: THE LEGACY OF DR. H.B. COWART, SOUTH MISSISSIPPI COUNTRY DOCTOR (1881-1970)

By Jane E. Marshall Brister. Paperback, $18.95. Eakin Press, 800/880-8642, www.eakinpress.com.

In these days of HMOs, DNA, and MRIs, the compassionate country doctor seems a strange and long-ago concept. But one such legendary Mississippi doctor remains alive in the memories of his granddaughter, and thanks to her efforts to collect information on his life and practice, the doctor's legacy--along with the sense of a simpler time-has been preserved in print.

Jane Brister's close connection with her grandfather, Hiram Benjamin Cowart, began when he delivered her in Poplarville in 1937. But the doctor's distinguished career had begun much earlier, when he began serving as a family practitioner in 1905. Cowart, who came from a long line of physicians, worked mainly in the Poplarville area until 1965, delivering more than 5,000 babies and earning a reputation as a gifted diagnostician.

Cowart's larger-than-life persona is captured by his granddaughter through family memories, letters, and interviews with colleagues as well as former patients and their descendants. Her research turns up the story of a man with a variety of interests, from growing roses to driving powerful cars. In addition to his long days treating "people of all strata of society," he also served as a staff Colonel to three governors. His dedication to the community even prompted the leaders of Poplarville to celebrate "Dr. Cowart Day" in 1950, complete with a parade of now-grown-up babies he had delivered over the years, marching bands, and a barbecue with "enough food to feed the throngs."

"He did the best he could with what he had for the time in which he lived," Brister writes in the book's introduction. "He was a legend in his own time and for me, he still is."

Author Brister now lives in Nacogdoches, Texas, where she is a professor at Stephen F. Austin University. A percentage of the profits from the sale of Doc will be donated to the Pearl River Community College Foundation.