MARTHA BERRY: Little Woman with a Big Dream

This year's second biography of Georgia's early (1902) self-help educator is less detailed but just as adoring as the first (Myers, Angel of Appalachia, p. 127, J-55). Myers treats many minor incidents more elaborately and a narrower portrait of the woman emerges. Blackburn excludes much of Aunt Martha's (not Miss Berry but her freed slave's) homey sayings; but she also avoids discussing the segregated set-up, whereas Myers acknowledges it in the unfortunate use of different dialects for mountain folk, black folk, and the rest. If you think your readers will want an account of the progression from Sunday meeting in the play cottage to a modern educational complex, you'll have to overlook flaws in either treatment.