Book Reviews

By James R. Hansen Simon & Schuster; 2023 Hardcover, $28.95 Genre: Nonfiction Reviewed by Don Noble James R. Hansen is professor emeritus of history at Auburn University, now living in Birmingham. He is, by profession, an academic, but his subject matter, over 14 books, has been the most exciting imaginable, including a biography of Neil Armstrong and a book about the Challenger disaster. His new book, Completely Mad, is the day-by-day story of two very different men who, really by chance, [...]

By Julie Buckner Armstrong University of Alabama Press 2023 Paper: $24.95 Genre: Non-fiction Reviewed by Nancy Wilstach If you are, as am I, a transplant to Alabama, you surely have asked yourself about the white contemporaries who witnessed civil rights history in the making and wondered: “What were they thinking?” Specifically, those who were close in age to the African American children who withstood a steady stream of abuse simply to go to school or who lay fearfully in bed at [...]

By Thomas Oliver Ott WordCrafts Press; 2019 Paperback: $18.99 Genre: Historical Fiction Reviewed by Edward Journey Thomas Oliver Ott, in his meticulously researched historical novel, Saturday and the Witch Woman, combines his scholarly knowledge of the 1791 Haitian Slave Rebellion and its leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture; the American slave trade; and his own personal family history to craft a compelling and nuanced narrative focused on a real person, Kwambe Ansong. The name means “born on Saturday, seventh-born child” in Ansong’s native Lucumi [...]

By Jennifer S. Davis Press 53, 2022 Paperback: $19.95 Cloth or Paper: price Genre: Short Fiction Reviewed by Abby McGinn Jennifer S. Davis, originally from Alabama, serves as an associate professor of English at LSU and is the Director of the Creative Writing Program. She has previously published two other collections of short stories, winning the Iowa Award for Short Fiction for Her Kind of Want. Davis’s works have also appeared in The American Scholar, One Story, and The Paris Review. [...]

By Dan Carter University of Georgia Press, NewSouth Books Imprint; 2023 Hardcover: $19.98 Genre: History Reviewed by Edward Journey Those who care to know are probably aware of the bizarre story of Asa Carter, the hate-mongering antisemitic Klansman and speech writer for George C. Wallace. After financial and reputational ruin, Asa Carter disappeared from public view for a time, “decided to become an Indian,” and reemerged as “Forrest Carter,” a Native American who wrote the novel that became Clint Eastwood’s popular [...]

By Amos Jasper Wright IV University of West Alabama, 2023 Paper, $22.95 Fiction Reviewed by Bill Plott Although a novel, this is also an extraordinary work of history. Using Cancer Alley as a setting, Wright has penned a book that is essentially about racism – the systemic and pervasive racism of not just the South but also the nation. Perhaps no white historian has told it with quite the passion that Wright brings to the table. Cancer Alley is the regional [...]

By Anne Whitehouse Dos Madres, 2020 Cloth: $19.00 Genre: Poetry Reviewed by Foster Dickson Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, Anne Whitehouse writes a highly personal kind of poetry that ranges in subject matter from personal observations to the imaginative consideration of historical figures. Thus, the title of her 2020 collection, published by Dos Madres Press, is quite appropriate: Outside from the Inside. The slim volume contains four sections: “Tides of the Body,” “It Wasn’t An Hallucination,” “The Ancient World,” and “A Dog’s [...]

By Joe Cuhaj Prometheus Books; 2022 Paperback: $21.95 Genre: Science Reviewed by Edward Journey With his heavily researched Space Oddities: Forgotten Stories of Mankind’s Exploration of Space, Joe Cuhaj has tapped into the space aficionado’s desire to know even more about the exploration of the proverbial “final frontier.” The book captures the true breathless fanboy spirit of its New-Jersey born, Alabama-based author who “applied to take part in NASA’s Journalist in Space program but never heard back.” Cuhaj, a Navy veteran [...]

By Joe Taylor Sagging Meniscus, 2023 Paperback: $19.95; Kindle: $8.99 Genre: Fiction Reviewed by Danny Gamble  Dust you are, and to dust you will return. Genesis 3:19 Take a cup of existentialism, add a tablespoon of phenomenology, and sprinkle a dash of nihilism. Stir and bake for 109 pages. The result? A Southern Gothic tale that takes no turns off Highway 28 West, the Highway to Hell. In reality, Highway 28 is a stretch of blacktop that runs through Sumpter, Marengo, [...]

By George H. Wolfe Livingston Press, 2022 Paper. $19.95 Genre: Fiction Reviewed by Jim Hilgartner At its most elemental, the narrative in Aftershock, a novel by George H. Wolfe, follows Dante Gabriel Larocca, an Army veteran wounded in a tank battle late in World War II, as he navigates the new battlefield of academia under the GI Bill. But there is nothing elemental about this compelling and complex story, which in lucid and vivid prose intertwines the fortunes of a disparate [...]

By Carrie Chappell Paris Heretics, 2022 Paperback Genre: Poetry Reviewed by Bee Baldwin Carrie Chappell’s Loving Tallulah Bankhead is an enchanting celebration of the non-conforming, untraditional, “fallen” women of the South with stage/film actress and Alabama native Tallulah Bankhead as its star. Tallulah starred in movies such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat and appeared as Catherine the Great in A Royal Scandal, and she was nearly Gone with the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara. However, despite this acclaim, Tallulah Bankhead has been viewed as [...]

By Susan Cushman, editor MadVille Publishing, 2023 Paper: $19.95 Genre: Inspirational Reviewed by Cheryl Carpenter Contrary to assurances given to frightened children that “there’s no such thing as ghosts,” the poems, essays, short stories, and art of Susan Cushman’s All Night, All Day: Angels, Life and Death maintain that there are, indeed, ghosts and angels among us all the time. Twenty-five distinguished women – several with Alabama connections – have contributed to this intriguing collection with the common theme that people [...]

By Kelly Kazek with illustrations by Joshua J. Hamilton Alabama Media Group, 2022 Hardback: $19.99 Genre: Humor Reviewed by Abby McGinn Kelly Kazek is an award-winning journalist and humor columnist. She is the author of 19 books, which include picture books, chronicles of motherhood, and tales from her days as a reporter. She is especially known for writing about Southern culture, and her work currently appears on It’s a Southern Thing and her blog, KellyKazek.com. Her numerous accolades include two Alabama [...]

by Rachel Hawkins St. Martin’s Press, 2022 Cloth: $28.99 Genre: Murder mystery Reviewed by Cheryl Carpenter With the simple declaration “Houses remember,” Rachel Hawkins sets the mood for her latest novel, The Villa. Although the book jacket alludes to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as one possible influence, I couldn’t help drawing a comparison to Poe’s “House of Usher” or, more particularly, to several Henry James novels in which houses are personified. No Turn of the Screw apparitions are on display in The [...]

By Rebecca Browder Home House Press; 2023 Paperback: $14.95 Genre: Short Stories Reviewed by Edward Journey If you’re a child and want to know the details, you must eavesdrop on your parents or the neighborhood ladies gossiping over glasses of iced tea. At least that’s how the reader learns some of the more salacious details in Rebecca Browder’s short story collection, Sorry Men in Southern Literature. These are brave, often sorrowful, slice-of-life stories that are as likely to end on a [...]

By Charles Ghigna Schiffer Kids, 2023 Hardcover: $24.99 Genre: Children’s Poetry Reviewed by Kelly Kazek I was lucky enough to spend my childhood emersed in rhyme. Both from my maternal grandmother, a writer of children’s poetry, and from the likes of Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss. Being able to paint with rhymes is a superpower, one I’m certain is aided by mystical forces, and that is why Charles Ghigna needs a cape. Ghigna, known as Father Goose because he has authored [...]

By Patti Callahan Henry Atria Books, An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2023 Hardcover, $28.99 Reviewed by Linda Henry Dean It is hard to imagine a situation in which a loving parent would pack a knapsack for his/her child, hang a luggage tag around the child’s neck (along with a gas mask and a self-addressed postcard to be sent when the child found a home), and put the child on a train bound for an unknown destination with strangers who [...]

By Kent Quaney University of Wisconsin Press, 2022 Paper: $18 Genre: FictionReviewed by Michel Aaij Kent Quaney comes to us by way of Utah, Australia, and Southern Miss; he now directs the Creative Writing program at Auburn University, Montgomery. One Breath from Drowning is his first novel: it’s a fun read, light in tone but serious in content, and the promise of things to come. The novel recounts the adventures, personal growth, and redemption of Ryan and Sam, two young men [...]

by Adam Vines Louisiana State University Press, 2022 Paperback: $17.95 Genre: Poetry Review by Ken Autrey In his third book, Adam Vines, who teaches creative writing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has fashioned a collection making skilled use of traditional forms, such as the sonnet, triolet, and pantoum, but also nonce forms following various meters and rhyme schemes. Those structural elements mark a distinct change from his previous volume, Out of Speech, a series of ekphrastic poems that [...]

By Lee Smith Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill; 2023 Hardcover: $27.00 Genre: Fiction Reviewed by Edward Journey Writer Lee Smith’s generosity to aspiring young writers, as well as to her veteran colleagues, is well-documented. She is widely regarded for her encouragement and support. Those traits extend to the characters she creates for the stories she tells – short stories, memoirs, and fifteen novels at last count. Smith’s new novel, Silver Alert, is another sterling example of that generosity of spirit that [...]

By Daniel Wallace With Illustrations by William Neely Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2023 $28, Hardcover; $14.99, Kindle Reviewed by Danny Gamble The very early 1970s, Homewood, Alabama, harbored few “hippies.” Daniel Wallace, author of Big Fish and five other novels, introduces two—his sister Holly and her life-long companion, William Neely. Make that three if you count Daniel, and you should. This is his story after all.  His new memoir This Isn’t Going To End Well: The True Story of a [...]

By Ann Bedsole Hardback: $26 Paperback: $14.50 Reviewed by Don Noble Like many of us, Ann Bedsole felt it wise to stay close to home during the COVID pandemic. Rather than just killing time while avoiding dying, she decided to use the enforced seclusion to write her autobiography, and the result is more revealing and candid and amusing than one would expect from a very well-known public figure. Born in Selma, in 1930, but raised mostly in Jackson, Alabama, Bedsole had [...]

By Jefferson Cowie Basic Books, 2022 Cloth: $35.00 Genre: History Reviewed by Foster Dickson In his book’s section about the Civil War, historian Jefferson Cowie apprises the reader that neither Eufaula specifically, nor Barbour County more generally were significant locations in the fighting. So, in the scope of Southern history, many may not know about this place. However, the rest of the four-hundred-plus pages in his 2022 book Freedom’s Dominion make sure that we understand how significant this place is, to [...]

By Bobby Mathews Shotgun Honey Books; 2023 Paperback: $15.95 Genre: Contemporary Noir Reviewed by Edward Journey Crime writer Bobby Mathews knows Birmingham from back alley to bougie. His new book, Magic City Blues, explores the city in all its variety, serving at times as a travelogue as well as a hard-boiled whodunnit. Mathews’s self-proclaimed “checkered past” includes award-winning journalism and short crime fiction; his crime novel about professional wrestling, Living the Gimmick, was published in 2022. Magic City Blues is raucous [...]