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“The Pillared City: Greek Revival Mobile,” by John S. Sledge, Photography by Sheila Hagler
October 12, 2009
In Alabama, Greek Revival may have flourished best in Mobile, but when planters from the Black Belt came to town to meet with their cotton factors and to shop, they liked what they saw and sometimes had their country rural places built in this style.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
“Mighty by Sacrifice: The Destruction of an American Bomber Squadron, August 29, 1944” by James L. Noles and James L. Noles, Jr.
September 28, 2009
WWII veterans are passing on now at a rapid rate and the generation that came home and resumed civilian life and said so little about their experiences will soon be silent forever. Their stories, like the ones the Noleses have captured in this book, must not be lost.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
Alabama Illustrated: Engravings From 19th Century Newspapers
September 21, 2009
Although the five illustrated newspapers from which the engravings in Alabama Illustrated were taken were all published elsewhere, two in New York, two in Boston and one in London, the readers of these papers had a strong curiosity about life in the American South.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
“The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement,” by Bob Zellner, with Constance Curry; Foreword by Julian Bond
September 14, 2009
This is a story told calmly, without bitterness or self-aggrandizement. I admired Zellner’s candor about his adversaries, without a smarmy mellowness. He has, as a Christian, mostly forgiven, but he has not forgotten.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
“When the Buddha Met Bubba: A Novel,” by Richard “Dixie” Hartwell
September 7, 2009
This clever tale ranges widely, making references not only to Buddhism, the Talmud and Christian foot-washing, but also Cesar Milan, the dog whisperer, and new age ideas such as “wherever you are that is where you are supposed to be.”
APR - Alabama Public Radio
“Beyond the Miracle Worker: The Remarkable Life of Anne Sullivan Macy and Her Extraordinary Friendship with Helen Keller,” by Kim E. Nielsen
August 31, 2009
We may know Annie Sullivan mainly from the play and the movie “The Miracle Worker,” but she was famous long before those. She and Keller were national, even international, celebrities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, performing on the lecture circuit, in vaudeville, even in a movie.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
Steve Renfroe, by Katherine Kilgore
June 29, 2009
By the end of the novel, I had become so irritated with Caroline and so unsympathetic, that I no longer cared whether she decided to go to Florence, Alabama, to teach school or marry the lawyer from Birmingham or do whatever else she wants. Good luck to her.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
Yazoo Blues, by John Pritchard
June 22, 2009
This novel is a lascivious, sex-filled, dirty comic routine. It’s not for everyone, but if you can stand it, there’s a laugh on every page.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
Vicksburg, 1863, by Winston Groom
June 15, 2009
Vicksburg, 1863, is Groom’s fifteenth book, and it is beginning to look as if he will be known, in the end, as Winston Groom, gifted narrative historian, not just as the author of Forrest Gump, notwithstanding how delightful that novel is.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
The Devil’s Garden, by Ace Atkins
June 8, 2009
The writing career of James Lee Burke is, in many ways, typical. After a half dozen literary novels that did not sell much, Burke created his South Louisiana detective, Dave Robicheaux, and the Robicheaux books have come in a steady and profitable stream now for many years.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, An American Town, by Warren St. John
April 13, 2009
So this is a story, truly, of the Fugees and soccer, but also of the American immigrant experience as it takes place in the 21st century, with global influxes. St. John demonstrates that the process is often difficult, but with good will and common sense, it can be done.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
Awesome, A Novel, by Jack Pendarvis
April 6, 2009
I am a fan of Jack Pendarvis’s work, and believe him to be our most promising rising southern humorist. Pendarvis had some marvelous stuff in his two collections of short pieces-The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure and Your Body Is Changing.
Awesome is his first novel and, although there is a lot of comic stuff, there are problems.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
Frankly, My Dear: Gone With the Wind Revisited, by Molly Haskell
March 2, 2009
Familiar to many from her guest appearances on Turner Classic Movies with Robert Osborne, Molly Haskell is one of our country’s foremost movie critics, historians, and interpreters. Haskell has every credential needed and brings all her skills to bear in this book on GWTW. It is often said of Venice, there is no more to be said about Venice. One might think that about GWTW also. But Haskell has taken some new approaches towards this classic book and movie and there are new insights.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
Wishbones, by Carolyn Haines
February 23, 2009
Wishbones is the eighth in Carolyn Haines’ “Bones" series, and is a little different from its predecessors. The series’ premises were set out in Them Bones. Sarah Booth Delaney returns to her home, Dahlia House, in Zinnia, Mississippi, Sunflower County, because the family place is threatened with foreclosure. Sarah Booth’s parents died in a crash when she was twelve and she has been in NYC in a not very successful attempt to establish a career as an actress. Back in Zinnia she runs into a murder mystery, solves it, and in the course of the first couple of books sets up a detective agency.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
Up Close: Harper Lee; A Twentieth-Century Life, by Kerry Madden
June 1, 2009
As the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, which has sold, as we all now know, over thirty million copies in forty languages, and may be the best selling American novel of all time, of course she deserves to be there. There is no question this is an intelligent, organized, respectable piece of work; the better question is whether this book ever needed to be written at all.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
The Help: A Novel, by Kathryn Stockett
May 4, 2009
Kathryn Stockett received a BA in English and creative writing from UA, worked in magazines in NYC for nine years, and now lives in Atlanta. This is her first novel and it is a marvel, a great read, engrossing and fast-paced.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
On Harper’s Trail: Roland McMillan Harper, Pioneering Botanist of the Southern Frontier, by Elizabeth Findley Shores
May 11, 2009
He was an odd duck all right, but this book, with its many, many lists of the specimens, including their Latin names, Harper saw on his many, many outings, will be of interest mainly to botanists.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
The Well and the Mine: A Novel, by Gin Phillips
May 18, 2009
Those are kinds of novels this is not. What then are the strengths which led Barnes and Noble to make The Well and the Mine a “Discover Great New Writers Selection” and the Alabama Library Association to award it the 2009 prize for fiction? There are several.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
The Cracker Queen: A Memoir of a Jagged, Joyful Life, by Lauretta Hannon
May 25, 2009
Frankly, I was reminded of the t-shirts I occasionally see on women in malls. They suggest, and I am prettying this up—“I am a vulgar person with an evil temper, hormonally unbalanced, and on my last nerve. If you distress me in the slightest, I will hurt you.” I give these women a lot of space and I feel the same way about this book.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
“Fanning the Spark: A Memoir,” by Mary Ward Brown
April 27, 2009
Brown’s many devoted fans will take in this book avidly, wanting to know every detail of her life, even though it is a life spent mainly rooted in middle Alabama, on a farm, without global travel except for one trip to Russia, or politics or scandal, or rich, famous, important friends and acquaintances.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
Truman Capote’s Southern Years: Stories from a Monroeville Cousin, by Marianne M. Moates
April 20, 2009
In tiny Monroeville, Alabama, population about 1,400, in the 1920s and ’30s, Nelle Harper Lee and Truman Capote were friends and next-door neighbors.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
The Adventures of Douglas Bragg: A Novel, by Madison Jones
March 9, 2009
Jones’ hero is young Douglas Bragg, who is 24 years old, has graduated from college, lives in Birmingham, Alabama in 1960 and has itchy feet. He will go out to see the world, heading north, hitchhiking.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
The Agnostics: A Novel, by Wendy Rawlings
February 16, 2009
Rawlings has a pleasing style, a good eye for the Tom Wolfe "status life" detail, draws convincing and realistic characters and has certainly captured the tone of this slice of the 70's and 80's. This novel reads smoothly, and I enjoyed it, even if I could not finally figure out whose side Rawlings was on. Maybe that is after all its greatest strength.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
The Millionaires: A Novel of the New South, by Inman Majors
February 9, 2009
Majors has published The Millionaires, set in Knoxville in the 1970s, and it is a marvel. The Millionaires, with its wry, sophisticated narrative voice, a voice in full control, is the best, most fully accomplished new novel I have read in perhaps three years.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
The Fair Hope of Heaven: A Hundred Years After Utopia, by Mary Lois Timbes
February 2, 2009
Timbes is something of an expert on Fairhope, having written a previous Fairhope book, Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree, with Robert E. Bell. She has a pride in the town’s unusual history, and she has a lament, a sad feeling, for what has happened to Fairhope recently. So this book serves as a kind of warning to pleasant, quaint places everywhere.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
Nursery Rhyme Noir: The Hasp Deadbolt Files, by David C. Kopaska-Merkel
January 19, 2009
Nursery Rhyme Noir is not quite flash fiction but it is only one notch up—the short-short. Kopaska-Merkel has created a P.I., Hasp Deadbolt, often mistakenly called Deadbeat, to tell these stories. Read aloud, or even silently, Deadbolt sounds like Garrison Keillor’s Guy Noir...
APR - Alabama Public Radio
In the Company of Owls, by Peter Huggins. Illustrated by Paula G. Koz
January 12, 2009
This novel may simply be mislabeled and should be marketed as a “chapter book,” that newish genre in between children’s books—in which the story is told primarily through pictures—and young adult. The plot is thin and the characters not much developed, but if the readers are 7-10, it should be appropriate.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
Jim Crow and Me: Stories from My Life as a Civil Rights Lawyer, by Solomon S. Seay, Jr.
January 5, 2009
Solomon Seay did not wish to write an autobiography or a memoir and he has not. This volume is, as the subtitle indicates, a collection of anecdotes, mainly stories from his decades as a civil rights attorney in Alabama, mainly from 1957 to 1977. In a way, this format is more effective than a regular biography, because the day-to-day life of almost anyone is not that interesting. Seay’s book is, then, a series of dramatic scenes, which are, I think, what we remember most from histories and biographies anyway.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
Fields of Asphodel (A Novel), by Tito Perdue
December 22, 2008
Tito Perdue, now retired on the family property in Brent, Alabama, has been writing for twenty-five years, with critical but not much popular success. At the end of Perdue’s fourth volume of fiction, the protagonist, Leland “Lee” Pefley, dies at age 73. On the first page of Fields of Asphodel, Pefley, who always introduces himself as Pefley, the Alabama branch, wakes up in the afterlife, the underworld, but not exactly the Christian heaven or hell or purgatory.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
Yucatan in an Era of Globalization, edited by Eric N. Baklanoff and Edward H. Moseley
December 15, 2008
This is a volume of eight heavily researched, scholarly essays on various aspects of life and commerce in one of the thirty-one states of the Republic of Mexico. It is not, on the face of it, something I would review in this space. After all, how many readers would have a serious enough interest in the state of Yucatan to read such a book?
APR - Alabama Public Radio
Walk-On: My Reluctant Journey to Integration at Auburn University, by Thom Gossom, Jr.
December 8, 2008
The author’s face on the dust jacket of this memoir will be familiar to many. Thom Gossom has had a long and successful acting career in movies such as Fight Club and on television as city councilman Ted Marcus in In the Heat of the Night and as Judge Blake Winters in Boston Legal. He has had guest starring roles on CSI, Cold Case, Without a Trace, The West Wing, NYPD Blue, and ER.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
Space: A Novel, by Roger Reid
December 1, 2008
Awith the botany/ecology of Longleaf, there is in this novel some science, surrounded by a large spoonful of sweet whodunit to make the medicine go down. Reid weaves in information about black holes, the escape velocity required to leave different planets, the Big Bang and the expansion of the solar system, discussions of the speed of light and the cosmic wave background, ubiquitous in the universe, and the necessity of living in the right neighborhood in any galaxy—not too near the center, not too near the edge. All of this is quite palatable.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
We Are Soldiers Still & We Were Soldiers Once... And Young by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway
November 24, 2008
We Were Soldiers Once… And Young was a national best-seller and was made into a Hollywood film starring Mel Gibson. That book was remarkable for a number of reasons.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
“A Secret Word,” by Jennifer Paddock
November 17, 2008
Paddock’s first novel, “A Secret Word,” is set mainly in her home town of Fort Smith, Arkansas.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
The Wait, by Frank Turner Hollon
November 10, 2008
As demonstrated best perhaps in The Point of Fracture, Hollon is capable of convincing, intricate plotting, but those skills are not evident in The Wait.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
Heart in the Right Place: A Memoir, by Carolyn Jourdan
November 3, 2008
This book is charming, a pure delight, and I enjoyed every page.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
Gather Up Our Voices: Edited by Jeanie Thompson
October 13, 2008
Selected Writings from Recipients of the Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer 1998-2007
APR - Alabama Public Radio
The Great War in the Heart of Dixie: Alabama during World War I, Edited by Martin T. Olliff
October 27, 2008
Alabama from 1914 to 1918, that is, during the Great War, is a subject historians agree is understudied.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
Swimmers in the Sea, by Denzil Strickland
October 6, 2008
Swimmers in the Sea, a first novel by an absolutely unknown, middle-aged author, published by a small, new press in Winston-Salem, N.C., was not a slam dunk. But I was captured by the blurbs.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
Letter From Point Clear
October 6, 2008
Ellen Owen and her brother Morris were raised on Mobile Bay, on the promenade, just a few houses down the boardwalk from the Grand Hotel. When they were teenagers, their affluent family sent them north to New England, to school, and that was that.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
The Bay of Pigs
October 6, 2008
Howard Jones’s tenth and newest book, The Bay of Pigs, is published by Oxford University Press in its series Pivotal Moments in American History.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
Staying Ahead of the Posse: The Ben Jobe Story
October 6, 2008
This book is not what it appears to be—that is, an as-told-to sports biography. It would be better if it were, because Ben Jobe is a man who has led an unusual and interesting life.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
A Yellow Watermelon
October 6, 2008
A Yellow Watermelon is the fourth “Young Adult” novel I have read recently. Is it useful to ask a critic in his mid-sixties to evaluate a story intended for 12-year-olds? Maybe not, but what choice do we have?
APR - Alabama Public Radio
Coming of Age at the Y
October 6, 2008
Cobb’s novels since this first one have been either serious or, if comedies, dark ones, whereas Coming of Age at the Y is an effervescent, bubbly pleasure.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
Breathing Out the Ghost, by Kirk Curnutt
October 6, 2008
There is no question about whether Curnutt’s first novel is well done. Breathing Out the Ghost has already won the Independent Publishers bronze medal for fiction and the 2008 Best Book of Indiana in Fiction, and is a finalist in the Foreword Magazine fiction competition.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
With Music and Justice for All: Some Southerners and their Passions
September 4, 2008
Frye Gaillard, now writer-in residence at the University of South Alabama, has earned a place on the top shelf of interpreters of the recent South. This is the shelf occupied by popular writers such as Hal Crowther and Roy Blount Jr. and academic scholars such as Wayne Flynt.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
The Girl Who Stopped Swimming
September 4, 2008
Many years ago, when I was writing a movie review column, an older woman came up to me at a cocktail party and said, “Dr. Noble, my husband and I read your reviews faithfully. We find them very useful. If you like a movie, we don’t go.” Perhaps this is the case here. I don’t hold with ghosts and Ouija boards, but if my description of The Girl Who Stopped Swimming sounds good, by all means, buy it and take it to the beach.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
Pocketful of History: Four Hundred Years of America—One State Quarter at a Time
September 4, 2008
James Noles is a West Point graduate and a Birmingham attorney who has created a second career for himself, not as a novelist in the now overcrowded tradition of John Grisham, but as an independent historian.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
In the Path of the Storms: Bayou La Batre, Coden, and the Alabama Coast
June 2, 2008
This degree of cruelty at the hands of government was not to be matched again until 2005, when the citizens of Alabama looked to FEMA and other government agencies for aid after Katrina.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins
June 9, 2008
The other mainly Alabama essay is “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Moon Winx,” which is just that—a meditation not on the nearly defunct Moon Winx Lodge, but on the neon sign in front of the Moon Winx Lodge, which was supposed to be in service to the lodge but has now surpassed it.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
Comeback Season: How I Learned to Play the Game of Love
June 16, 2008
These memoirs are sociology, anthropology, like Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, or travel narratives of distant and exotic places. Except that, of course, the time is now, the place is here, and the mysterious creatures speaking and under discussion are American women, friendly and intelligent and utterly un-understood by the mass of American males.
APR - Alabama Public Radio
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