When he was 46, Steven Faulkner and his 16-year-old son, Justin, paddled and portaged their way on a 1,000-mile journey along the Mississippi River.

Their goal: follow the path of French explorers Marquette and Joliet.

The trip took place in 1996, and Faulkner -- now a creative-writing professor at Longwood University in Farmville -- took until this year and went through about 10 revisions to publish his account, Waterwalk: A Passage of Ghosts (373 pages, RDR Books, $18.95). If you're into the past, or travel, or father-and-son adventures, you'll want to check this out.

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In a famous response to a Supreme Court ruling with which he disagreed, President Andrew Jackson has been quoted as saying: "[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!"

Much of the South responded in the same manner to the Brown v. Board of Education decision that outlawed school segregation.

Now, in With All Deliberate Speed: Implementing Brown v. Board of Education (339 pages, University of Arkansas Press, $24.95), Brian J. Daugherity, an instructor and assistant to the head in the history department at Virginia Commonwealth University, and Charles C. Bolton, a professor and head of history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, provide a broad assessment of how well the decision was implemented.

Written by a group of historians and edited by Daugherity and Bolton, the 12 essays examine the diverse ways in which the decision's supporters sought to make the court's ruling a reality.

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Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has won an honorable mention for design in the American Association of Museums' annual publications competition, the only nationally juried competition of its kind.

The book, published by the museum and designed by Jean Kane of the museum staff, is an updated survey of postwar art (1945-1960) in the museum's collection.

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The Lutheran Writers Book Club is recommending The Madhouse Nudes, a novel by a National Endowment Award-winning author, to 6 million American Lutherans.

"It's a little unexpected," said author Robert Schultz, a professor of English at Roanoke College in Salem. "When some people hear that members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America are being recommended a book about a painter who specializes in the female nude, they hear the word 'evangelical' and think of the religious right and its problems with the NEA and all that. But the ELCA is a mainstream, traditional church. And it's got a lot of NPR-listening, literature-reading members."

The Lutheran Writers Project formed in October 2007 and launched its book club to recommend literary works by Lutheran writers to Lutheran readers.

"The Madhouse Nudes," Schultz's first novel, appeared in 1997 and explores "the madhouse of American contemporary sexuality," Schultz said. -- Jay Strafford