Southern Souls

A Messy Job I Never Did See A Girl Do. By Mary Jane Ryals. 144 pages. Livingston, Alabama: University of West Alabama Living-ston Press, $9.95

Is offbeat Southern literature, by nature, oddly meaningful or just plain bizarre? You won't have time to ponder or analyze as you quickly consume this short-story collection of 12 vignettes by Mary Jane Ryals, a member of the College of Business faculty.

The pages are filled with jarring and realistic panoramas of floods, tornados, alcohol abusers, mamas who don't love outwardly and children who long for love (or just some attention and food would do), long-before-their-time deaths, and myriad ways not only to pass the time but swear at it vociferously. As acclaimed local writer Connie May Fowler (Before Women Had Wings, Ballantine 1997) surmised in her testimony on the back cover, here's a book of "hopeful souls adrift."

Mims' Martyr

Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, America' First Civil Rights Martyr. By Ben Green. 304 pages. New York: Simon & Schuster. Cloth, $25.00.

"Florida, the land of sunshine, is drenched with blood!"

So proclaimed the International Fur Workers, who in winter 1952, held a work stoppage to protest the murder of Florida's Harry T. Moore. Moore's tireless work for civil rights made him the movement's first martyr. A native of Mims, a tiny burg near Titusville in Brevard County, Moore was dynamited to death along with his wife Harriette as they slept on Christmas night in 1951, before Rosa Parks and Malcolm X and back when Martin Luther King was still a Boston University student called Mike.