Early Autumn - Apple and Cinnamon

New VapeSafe Early Autumn eLiquid.

Early Autumn - Apples and Cinnamon flavored eLiquid evokes memories of the beginning of fall. The feel of the warm autumn sun on the skin. The sight of vibrant hues of amber and crimson leaves hanging in gently swaying trees soaking up the light. The rustling sound of the breeze slipping through the tree branches tugging and teasing the remaining leaves into releasing their hold and floating downward. The laughing children raking the leaves into piles and then running and jumping into the soft, luscious piles scattering the leaves again. The delicious smells of baking apple and cinnamon pies wafting through open windows. These are the sights, smells and tastes of Early Autumn.

Early Autumn eLiquid by VapeSafe captures the essence of Autumn no matter what season it is. Early Autumn eLiquid is flavorful combination of apples and cinnamon. As with all of the VapeSafe eLiquids, our mixtures are designed to produce nice, heavy vapors and the most succulent flavors. Try Early Autumn eLiquid today!

Technology Information:

Tobacco Road

Description

Set during the Depression in the depleted farmloads surrounding Augustus, Georgia, Tobacco Road was first published in 1932. It is the story of the Lesters, a family of destitute white sharecroppers debased by poverty to an elemental state of ignorance and selfishness.

Reviews

Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-01-25
Summary: ""He had felt himself sink lower and lower, his condition fall further and further, year after year, until now his trust in God"

...and the land was at the stage where further disappointment might easily cause him to lose his mind and reason."

I love bleak books. And this is one of the bleakest I've read. It's the story of a family of ignorant, racist, illiterate white sharecroppers barely getting by near Augusta, Georgia during the Depression. It begins with Lov Bensey, son-in-law of Jeeter Lester, cautiously passing by his father-in-law's place along Tobacco Road with a sack of turnips he's just walked miles to buy, to ask that he talk Bensey's barely-teenaged wife into sleeping with him rather than alone on a pallet as she has since they married about a year prior. All but two of the Lester family offspring, eighteen-year-old Ellie Mae and sixteen-year-old Dude, have moved away. The Lester family has lived a long time in abject poverty, ever since they lost the family land. Even though Jeeter knows he and his wife could earn a decent wage by spinning cotton if they moved to the city, he chooses to stay in a ramshackle house, put his faith in the lord, and get by collecting and selling the occasional load of near-worthless wood. While Jeeter and Lov discuss the situation, Ellie Mae (unmarried due to a prominent cleft lip), tries to make a move on the man to distract his attention from the bag. After the situation with the turnips (which ends badly for Lov), Jeeter returns home to find a boneless-nosed, preacher's widow named Sister Bessie (p 44) "past thirty-five, almost forty" on the porch with the rest of his family. Sister Bessie proclaims that she is going to buy a car with the insurance money from her husband's death so that she can continue her ministry and plans to pray on the idea of marrying Dude and making him a minister. The verdict comes in as expected. Dude agrees to marry Sister Bessie so that he can drive the fancy new car, purchased with her last penny, and they head out to do God's work. Following the keeping it bleak theme, there are collisions with the car (some deadly), a motherly mishap, Sisterly shenanigans and a whole lot of other sad stuff. The ending is the icing on the proverbial catastrophe cake.

My fellow book club members mostly disliked the book due to its racism, repetitiveness and stereotyping. I loved it. Although I'm usually the one raising the issue of racism and tracking the prevalence of the use of the "n" word (about 17 times by my count), what I loved about this book, which I expected to be difficult, dreary and dull, was that it was anything but. The overwhelmingly negative portrayal of Tobacco Road's characters was so over-the-top as to be comical. Other southerly stories: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. Brilliantly bleak: A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.

---

Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2009-06-05
Summary: "Another Novel Depicting How the Good Old Days Were Not So Good [91]"

Pathetic ignorance can breed innocent naivete, or - as is the case in this book - innocent abrasion.

Focusing upon the tenant farming Georgian sharecropping family during the worst years of poverty delivered by the Great Depression, this book entails serious introspection of the ruthless, but innocent, corrosive elements of a grossly dysfunctional family. The patriarch is Jeeter Lester, whose wife, Ada, and he parented more than a dozen children, and alienated the same in number.

Within the first pages, Jeeter conspires with Ada and hair-lipped daughter, Ellie May, to steal a bag of turnips from their son-in-law, Lov, who walked over 7 miles in the hot dry sands of Georgia, and spent a half day's pay for the edible treats. You then learn that Lov's marital relation is very suspect, as Jeeter delivered his 12-year old beauty Pearl - whose uniquity of being a blond is because she obtained her father's hair. All the others, including Ada and Jeeter, are brunettes. Jeeter is a sneak, and apparently Ada had her moments of sin as well.

As the pages turn, you cringe and moan as the country-bumpkin ignorance proves to be greater than that held by the simplest elementary school student. A car hustler practically reaches his hand into the pockets of Jeeter's half-retarded son Dude who marries a woman his senior by 25 years, Sister Bessie Rice.

And, while these miscreant adventures unfold, we learn more about the pathetic existence of Jeeter whose greed and lust make him more animal than man. And, from such example, the children do not fall far from the tree and have their respective vices and chinks in the armor of their soul.

Ultimately, Jeeter's ignorance is his bane. He clears his fields with fire, which hits the winds and swoops back to burn down his home, with he and Ada in it. But, being burnt to ash and becoming part of the land is an appropriate finish for the pathetic man who would engage in poverty and starvation for his Don Quixote-like dream to farm. To farm, one needed credit, something Jeeter lost years ago. After years of being prohibited credit by anyone with money to deliver the same, he could only conclude that his ability to farm was ended by man, not nature. But, to this reality he would not submit.

Delivered in a style of the southern eloquence of the impoverished soul - Stanley Kowalski of A Streetcar Named Desire comes to mind - the bullheaded ignorant folks of this novel too often commit despicable acts which any thought or conscience would commonly deter. But, these characters miss thought or conscience and commit acts which make those about them miserable, and the reader cry.

---

Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2008-04-29
Summary: "This South Should Never Rise Again"

As a son of the south, reading another child of the south is always an interesting adventure, and "Tobacco Road" was one of the great forbidden books of my childhood, along with "To Kill A Mockingbird," and forms a fairly neat flipside for that enduring and endearing tale of justice and innocence. "Tobacco Road" is that story from the Boo Radley house, plus some.

Caldwell's grotesques (you can hardly call them characters) are clearly cartoons and yet speak to a sad Southern truth that those of us who grew up in the 1950s and 60s knows always dwells there right below the surface ... that maddening ability to hear at astounding and intricate length grand designs for success while the shingles fall off the house, as well as the tendency to blame every misfortune on everything short of one's own rotten front door. The sultry sexuality, which Caldwell no doubt used to move mountains of books, is about as natural and animalistic as it comes, while also having an odd whiff of indifference and inconsequent confusion to it. Caldwell takes his particular variety of stereotypes (that die-hard defenders of the South yowl long and hard about) down the same steamy, dusty, bloody road that such other great Southern writers as William Faulkner and especially Flannery O'Conner do, but at a wholly different kind of remove that lets you know this is the wellhead for this school of writing. It's lean, taut writing (imagine Hemingway reborn into the Piedmont) counterbalanced by a keening repetitiveness when the characters run up against the same old fences that they have day-in and day-out for years. Menace always hangs slightly above the ground like spring-burning smoke, and that is a genuine Southern thing. It doesn't play the same in the North or the West. Caldwell finds that distinct Southern nerve, and hits it with a ballpeen hammer.

You may love it, you may hate it, but you cannot deny that with "Tobacco Road" you're at the very start of something lean, mean, and cruel in its unvarnished honesty. Mayberry be damned, this is the real South.

---

Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2007-09-25
Summary: "Debasing, but not necessarily limited to Southerners..."

I find it rather humorous to note that not only do the majority of the people getting offended by this work of literary brilliance hail from south of the Mason-Dixon, but also that no one seems to have a clue of Caldwell's primary intention. His always-controversial characters, particularly the men, represent not a backwards view of the South or an attept to persist a stereotype, but the abstraction that humans are little more than hairless animals. Caldwell reminds us that man is capable of regressing to a feral state when pushed to the very brink of survival. As we all have differing breaking points, so does each Lester, and each is depicted in varying states of "mental regression."

If you're interested in a book that you can read at face value and take a story and then go on to another book, look elsewhere. Someone else said it earlier: if you want a read that is basically a compendium of the post-depression South, read Steinbeck. If you want to take a look at the true, ugly, primal nature of man, pick this book up, especially if you're writing a paper...lots of material here!

---

Rating: 1 / 5
Date: 2007-06-15
Summary: "Depressing, Disappointing, and Depraved"

Don't waste your time on this book!

While I certainly didn't expect it to be cheerful, given its look at the life of subsistance farmers in the depression in the deep south, I was unprepared for the utter lack of redeeming quality in any of the characters, the plot, the themes, or the writing.

The characters in this book are utterly selfish, coarse, and debased. They are barely human beings, seeking only to satisfy animal needs. They kill and maim and destroy thoughtlessly. While out on a joy ride, two of the characters kill a man; they later kill a family member. There is no remorse. The characters repeatedly make fun of physical deformities. They revel in destruction of property. They're racist and ignorant.

This could be thought of as a type of satire, a hyper-exaggeration to produce comedy (as others reviewers have suggested) except that there is a problem with that. The writing, 99% of the time, isn't funny. Humor comes from the same word as "human" and with such grim material, there's little there to recommend it.

Still trying to purge this from my memory (sadly hard to do) and I'd suggest you pass this one by. Literature is suppose to uplift, or if it cannot uplift, it should educate, or illuminate. This just debases. Read Steinbeck instead.