Legacy: The Story of Talula Gilbert Bottoms and Her Quilts (Needlework and Quilting) [Paperback]

Nancilu Burdick (Author)

Book Description

Series: Needlework and Quilting | Publication Date: April 1, 1993

A true story of drama and courage, Legacy chronicles the life of a woman who created beauty during the harsh era of Reconstruction. Illustrated in full color. Indexed.

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson (April 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558532366
• ISBN-13: 978-1558532366
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 7.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,570,731 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is my favorite Q history book. I've read it three times, April 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Legacy: The Story of Talula Gilbert Bottoms and Her Quilts (Needlework and Quilting) (Paperback)

This book will inspire quilters to endeavor to produce more quilts as well as improve quality. The hardships experienced by Tallulah are written in a way that causes our hearts to emotionally bond with her.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Stunning Accomplishment, January 21, 2007

By 

gi (Louisiana) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Legacy: The Story of Talula Gilbert Bottoms and Her Quilts (Needlework and Quilting) (Paperback)

This book's accomplishment is stunning. I've read it three times, each time discovering new layers of meaning. This is one of those books that becomes part of one's experience. The best kind.

It also affords a model for the work of any aspiring cultural or material historian. And certainly it offers a student of quilt history and/or women's history a rare model and an extraordinarily complex and detailed picture of the life of one woman and her quilts in one time and place.

The book is completely belied by the determinedly and obviously biased views of two reviewers who posted to Amazon.com reviews. I cannot help wondering if they read the same book I read. Their criticism is of the South, not of the book. And it is a criticism of a stereotypical South, at that, not a region far too complex to comprehend in one sweep of bias. And certainly not the world captured in its minutae in this book.

LEGACY: THE STORY OF TALULA GILBERT BOTTOM AND HER QUILTS is not an apologia for the Confederacy or a condemnation of the Union in the Civil War, though a portion of it describes---one feels accurately and certainly matter-of-factly---the experience of a southern family caught up in the terrible combat of that war. To read it as two critics read it requires a bias so strong it precludes access to the real meaning of this remarkable story that moves from the ante-bellum South through two world wars with equal passion and loss.

The title is "Legacy: The Story of Talula Gilbert Bottoms and her Quilts," and its writer discovers in the many quilts created in good times and bad the meaning of her legacy from her grandmother. That legacy is most essentially a determined courage to accept life as it comes, without complaint or self-pity, but with a spirit of optimism and endurance that is nurtured by the creation of beauty.

The admiration heard in the authorial voice is, therefore, appropriate. And it is not sentimental. With the author, we discover her grandmother. And along with her, through her grandmother's quilts and the little autobiography Talula left, we come to admire this tough little woman who persevered through rheumatism and overwork, wars and contagions, poverty and modest economic security, and all the while continued to turn out meticulously wrought quilts individualized by her devotion to her craft and to her family, for whom she created these quilts.

Burdick lets Talula and her quilts speak, and there is not a drop of self-pity in either.

For anyone wanting to know what life was like for an ordinary white family in the Deep South from the mid-19th century through, say, WW II, "Legacy" offers an exceptional gift. There they are--the daily routines, the backbreaking farm and house work, the religious devotion and struggles, the children who die from diseases that left cemeteries full of tiny tombstones. But there also are the joys and devotions of family, the love of place, the achievement in the face of obstacles, and always--always--the quilts that defined one woman's values and meanings of life.

In little things--for instance, in the problems created when the young bride Talula spilled into the well some of the milk she was keeping cold there--we come to understand her world and her achievement.

In her study, Burdick has relied on techniques common to an approach more recently designated by material historian James Deetz as "material behaviors." Deetz expands the means of the material historian beyond the description and identification of artifacts. He suggests the inclusion of cognitive, psychological, spiritual behaviors to discover the fuller meaning of the material objects.

That is exactly what Burdick does with her grandmother's quilts. She places them in their natural context in order to make sense of them, to discover what they reveal about their art, their craft, about their maker.

And she does it so well, we forget for the reading that we too are not kinsmen of Talula Gilbert Bottoms.

The quiltmaking of the backcountry South is insufficiently documented and understood. This book goes a long way to remediating those problems.The existing journals of Southern women in the nineteenth century are most often those of women of considerable means, for they were the ones who could afford education. This book provides balance to those, for it describes and analyzes the life of a woman who had struggled to make herself literate, but whose means and circumstances precluded her achieving the exceptional feats she and her husband made accessible to their children, who achieved acclaim in science. The reader will find no moonlight-and-magnolias version of southern life in LEGACY.But he will find truth.

It should be noted that the writer's style is lively and vigorous (She is an English professor in New York state), the photographs of the quilts and of the Bottomses well done and complementary to the text, and the book generally set in an attractive format.

I came away from this book with a far better understanding of life for the ordinary family in the hinterland South and of the role quilts played in the lives of such families and of the women who made them. I also acquired a better appreciation for the quilts themselves and a more informed view of the quilts produced in the Southern backcountry. It is, for instance, generally presumed that poverty accounts for most choices of hinterland quilts. Yet Talula Bottoms experienced grave poverty, teetered on the edge of bankruptcy for a long time, but all the while found the means to create well-planned and executed quilts.

What a pleasure Ms. Burdick gives in her thoughtful, important book on her grandmother and her grandmother's quilts. I heartily recommend it to anyone who enjoys biography, women's or quilt history, cultural history, or who loves quilts. And it is salutary to anyone who needs to see courage in the flesh. A very good read!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Love Story, October 28, 2009

By 

L. McGinnis (CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Legacy: The Story of Talula Gilbert Bottoms and Her Quilts (Needlework and Quilting) (Paperback)

I took this family history for what it was , , , one account of both the trials and joys in the life of a one woman and her family. That these happened to begin in the south post Civil War era was part of that story. And, the historical view points where that of the south during that time. For those who are disturbed by these and would like a pure factual account of this period in our country's history, I suggest that you watch the PBS series,"The Civil War" produced by Ken Burns. This book is not the place to look for those facts. This is a book of "Remembrances". I loved this book. Talula's outlook on life was uniquely her own. Not all women during that period of history could have adjusted to her circumstances. In fact, her older sister had a much more difficult time. The south was totally economically destroyed. And many times it fell on the shoulders of the women to carry on after their husbands left them alone with children to feed and care for.

Take note of Talula's personal philosophy: "Whatever happens, I will not worry. If a thing can be helped, I will help it: if not, I will make the best of it." She makes mention of her "fingers itching to get to her quilting." Her love of her family, of God and of making her quilts sustained her through the most horrible circumstances one could imagine. That she managed to make by hand between 200 - 300 quilts during her lifetime while looking after her family through sickness and death, sorrow and personal loss while maintaining a lifeline in her letters to family members was beyond my comprehension. If only for the pictures of Talula's quilts, I would recommend this book - the story is the icing on the cake! And I would certainly describe it as a love story . . . love between a husband and wife, a woman and her family, and of the quilts she lovingly made for them.