Book Reviews
Moon over Sasova
Moon over Sasova: One American’s Experience Teaching in Post-Cold War Slovakia By Christopher Shaffer Hellgate Press, 2021 Paperback: $12.95 Genre: Nonfiction; Memoir Reviewed by Edward Journey Since I embrace the concept of “serendipity,” I felt like I had encountered a kindred soul when I read the first sentence of Christopher Shaffer’s engrossing Moon over Sasova: One American’s Experience Teaching in Post-Cold War Slovakia. Shaffer writes, “I owe my Slovakia experience largely to serendipity.” That experience began when Shaffer, an undergraduate at Auburn [...]
Distracted by Alabama
Distracted by Alabama: Tangled Threads of Natural History, Local History, and Folklore By James Seay Brown Jr. The University of Alabama Press; 2022 Hardcover: $39.95; E Book: $39.95 Genre: Nonfiction; Natural History; Folklore Reviewed by Edward Journey Distracted by Alabama: Tangled Threads of Natural History, Local History, and Folklore is James Seay Brown Jr.’s enthusiastic and detailed examination of twelve topics that make Alabama special to him. Along the way, he interviews and profiles a multitude of colorful and exuberant personalities who have [...]
The Southernization of America
The Southernization of America: A Story of Democracy in the Balance By Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker NewSouth Books, 2022 Hardcover, $25.95 Genre: Nonfiction; History Review by Steve Hubbard Like many of us who, in our politics, lean liberal to progressive, journalists Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker often felt anxious during the Trump presidency about the future of American democracy. Evidently, so did Randall Williams, Editor-in-Chief of Montgomery-based NewSouth Books. Williams was thinking about a book, The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America, that [...]
Reparations Now!
Reparations Now! By Ashley M. Jones Hub City Press, 2021 Paperback: $16.00 Genre: Poetry Review by Lisa Hase-Jackson In her latest collection, Reparations Now!, newly appointed Alabama Poet Laureate, Ashley M. Jones, braids the interpersonal with the political to record a family’s legacy within the context of American history, where liberty has always been reserved for specific individuals. It is at once tender and steady as it lays open, like a scrapbook of photographs and postcards, familial relationships and harsh realities that [...]
The Ghosts of Dyas Creek
The Ghosts of Dyas Creek By Sylvia Weiss Sinclair Vanguard Press, 2021 Paperback: $12.99 Genre: Fiction; Southern Gothic Review by Brianna Carnley In Bay Minette, Alabama in the 1920s, “where the longleaf pines stretch to the azure sky,” Margaret, a farmer’s wife and mother of four, goes out one night to feed the pigs some scraps and sees the white ghoulish figure of a man she knew that had died. She is so startled by this apparition that she slips, hits [...]
My Father Should Die in Winter
My Father Should Die in Winter By Barry Marks Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021 Paperback: $15.95 Genre: Poetry Reviewed by Edward Journey My Father Should Die in Winter, a new book of poetry by Barry Marks, is a work of grief, transcendence, enduring memory, and memory lost. The reader gathers morsels of information in the book’s progression after an opening page that simply lists names and dates for three individuals – Asher, Leah, and Noah. A blurb on the jacket informs [...]
Deep South Dynasty: The Bankheads of Alabama
By Kari Frederickson The University of Alabama Press; 2022 Hardcover: $39.95; E Book: $39.95 Genre: Southern History Reviewed by Edward Journey Most contemporary Alabamians know the Bankhead name from the eponymous tunnels, bridges, highways, national forests, and buildings found throughout the state and beyond. Tallulah Bankhead, a daughter of the Bankhead dynasty, was a talented actor who became a household name in the mid-twentieth century for her liberal politics and her frank, often ribald, personal style. Perhaps fewer remember the details [...]
Take My Hand
By Dolen Perkins-Valdez Berkley, 2022 Hardcover: $27.00, Kindle Edition: $14.99 Genre – Southern Fiction Review by Laura Platas Scott The 1970s is a decade that inspires nostalgia in many with its legacy of classic rock music, the Saturday Night Fever disco craze, bell bottom jeans and long sideburns. But for me, a young teen in that decade, with the images from the nightly newscasts of the turbulent 1960s still vividly fresh—the assassinations of JFK, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, civil [...]
Dead Weight: A Memoir in Essays
By Randall Horton Northwestern University Press, 2022 Paperback: $22.95 Genre - Memoir Reviewer: James E Cherry After finishing the final page in Randall Horton’s Dead Weight: A Memoir in Essays, one word resonates: survivor. What would have killed the average person—premature birth, drug addiction, drug smuggling, homelessness, incarceration—he has outlasted. With Dead Weight, Horton has put those experiences into perspective and is now determined to outlive them. The book’s opening chapter is destined to become a classic. Horton, on a park bench in [...]
White Bull
by Elizabeth Hughey Sarabande Books 2021 Paperback, $15.95 Genre: Poetry Review by H. M. Cotton Poet Elizabeth Hughey welcomes a new collection into the world with her Kathryn A. Morton Prize winning White Bull. This collection lands like a hammer on an anvil: forceful but with a delicate musical ringing. A note before the table of contents indicates that the poems within White Bull “are composed entirely of words taken from the letters and public statements of Theophilus Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor.” Connor was a [...]
My Little Town: A Pilgrim’s Portrait of a Uniquely Southern Place
By D.B Tipmore; Photographs by Frank Williams NewSouth Books, 2021 Hardcover: $25.95 Genre: Memoir Review by Edward Journey D.B. Tipmore has an aversion to “any Fox News program being televised during a meal; almost any speech by local or state Republican politicians; … any blanket statements about welfare checks; … any automatic presumption about blacks …; any self-serving dismissal of health care as a ‘right’; any uninformed derision of the word ‘socialism’; any Biblical explanation of natural law.” Given such aversions, the [...]
The Gulf South: An Anthology of Environmental Writing
Edited by Tori Bush and Richard Goodman University Press of Florida, 2021 Hardcover: $45.00 Genre: Environment / Nature Reviewed by Edward Journey I lived on Galveston Island, Texas, for a couple of years in the 1990s. On trips to and from Galveston to Alabama, I always looked forward to the crossing of the Atchafalaya Basin on an eighteen-mile stretch of I-10 between Baton Rouge and Lafayette, Louisiana. I would often schedule my travel so that I would hit the Atchafalaya at sunrise or sunset, [...]
Sweetgum & Lightning
Sweetgum & Lightning by Rodney Terich Leonard Four Way Books, 2021 Paperback: $16.95 Genre: Poetry Review H. M. Cotton Rodney Terich Leonard brings to us poetry steeped in a rich melodic tradition. This debut collection, Sweetgum & Lightning, pulls from musical roots. Herein, lines of jazz, the blues, real soulful music, reach out to grab the reader. Leonard takes ownership of the language and bends sound and sense into a chorus of nouns stacks on top of each other. What you [...]
Deep South Dynasty: The Bankheads of Alabama
Deep South Dynasty: The Bankheads of Alabama By Kari Frederickson The University of Alabama Press; 2022 Hardcover: $39.95; E Book: $39.95 Genre: Southern History Reviewed by Edward Journey Most contemporary Alabamians know the Bankhead name from the eponymous tunnels, bridges, highways, national forests, and buildings found throughout the state and beyond. Tallulah Bankhead, a daughter of the Bankhead dynasty, was a talented actor who became a household name in the mid-twentieth century for her liberal politics and her frank, often ribald, [...]
The Ghosts of Dyas Creek
The Ghosts of Dyas Creek By Sylvia Weiss Sinclair Vanguard Press, 2021 Paperback: $12.99 Genre: Fiction; Southern Gothic Review by Brianna Carnley In Bay Minette, Alabama in the 1920s, “where the longleaf pines stretch to the azure sky,” Margaret, a farmer’s wife and mother of four, goes out one night to feed the pigs some scraps and sees the white ghoulish figure of a man she knew that had died. She is so startled by this apparition that she slips, hits [...]
Sons of Achilles
Sons of Achilles By Nabila Lovelace YesYes books, 2018 Paperback: $18.00 Genre: Poetry Review by Jace Rose Malmquist Nabila Lovelace’s poems are smooth and sharp, harrowing and illuminating, switching and shifting slow like seasons, then hard as gears. She leaves blooms in the wake of her carnage, a warpath necessary to reclaim the body and the mind and the old ground itself, the one she grew up on. In her poem “On Knowing,” she considers the worst: “What else / is [...]
The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendents, and an Extraordinary Reckoning
by Ben Raines Simon & Schuster, 2022 Hardcover: $27.99 Genre: Nonfiction Review by Frye Gaillard On April 10, 2018, Ben Raines, in scuba gear and a wetsuit, slipped into the murky waters of the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta. Spring floods had stirred the muddy bottom, and the water, he remembered, “looked like chocolate milk.” Even with his mask he was diving blind. Soon, his foot brushed against what felt like a wooden plank, and Raines reached down and began to tug. The [...]
Scientist: E. O. Wilson: A Life in Nature
By Richard Rhodes Doubleday, 2021 Hardcover: $30.00 Genre: Biography Review by Edward Journey When author, biologist, ecologist, and naturalist E. O. Wilson died in December 2021, Alabama lost one of its most significant native sons. Wilson was born in Birmingham, grew up around Washington D.C., the Alabama and Florida Gulf Coast, and points in between, and made his initial reputation in myrmecology, the study of ants. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees in biology at the University of Alabama and his [...]
Behind the Magic Curtain: Secrets, Spies, and Unsung White Allies of Birmingham’s Civil Rights Days by T.K. Thorne
by T.K. Thorne NewSouth Books, 2021 Hardback, $28.95 Genre: Nonfiction; Southern History Review by Harvey H. Jackson Growing up in Deep South Alabama, I knew little of what had been going on in “The Magic City” when I arrived there in the fall of 1963 to begin my junior year at Birmingham Southern College. I had followed the Civil Rights Movement through newspapers and television, but it all seemed so far away. Now it wasn’t. I had to learn quickly. Arriving [...]
Changing Moods: Sixty Years in Black and White
by John Dersham New South Books, 2021 Hardcover, $40.00 Genre: Photography; Art Review by Ryan Meyer John Dersham is in love. His romance sprouted over sixty years ago. Since then, it has only grown. His new book is an autobiographical love story that chronicles the majority of his personal and professional life as a master photographer. Changing Moods: Sixty Years in Black and White shares six decades of black and white photographs with an emphasis on images produced by large-format film cameras. When [...]
The Whited Air: Mary Paul in Winter
by Susie Paul Finishing Line Press, 2021 Paperback: $14.99 Genre: Poetry Review by Jennifer Horne By happy accident, the kind that comes to poets who are alert to possibilities, Susie Paul learned of a nineteenth-century woman named Mary Paul. Although there is no genealogical relation, the poet clearly felt a relationship of affinity with the young woman whose voice she inhabits so effectively in these poems. As we learn in the Introduction, Mary Paul grew up on a farm in Massachusetts [...]
Filthy Animals
by Brandon Taylor Riverhead Books, 2021 $18.59 hardcover, $15.26 paperback, $13.99 Kindle Genre: Short Fiction Review by Jace Rose Malmquist The characters in Brandon Taylor’s short stories are all in pursuit of something: a touch, a truth, something that is real or could work in the place of something real, that could tide them from this thing to that, like a series of rope swings; big chances, easy ones, crazy ones, and no regret in any of them. As the reader [...]
field recordings of mind in morning
Poems by Hank Lazer; Music by Holland Hopson BlazeVOX, 2021 Paperback: $20.00 Genre: Poetry Review by Edward Journey The last time we checked in with poet Hank Lazer, author of thirty-two books of poetry and 2015 recipient of the Harper Lee Award, he was pondering themes of plague and survival, anger and calm, and life under a wannabe American autocrat in COVID19 SUTRAS. Lazer’s newest book, field recordings of mind in morning, includes writing in a less turbulent vein from pre-pandemic 2018 and 2019. [...]
Fight Songs: A Story of Love and Sports in a Complicated South
by Ed Southern Blair/Carolina Wren Press, 2021 Hardcover: $25.95 Genre: Nonfiction; Sports History; Sociology Review by Edward Journey About midway through Fight Songs: A Story of Love and Sports in a Complicated South, Ed Southern states that he’s “working on making [Wake Forest] every Alabama fan’s second-favorite team.” I might be an easy convert; a Baptist-affiliated university whose athletic teams are called the “Demon Deacons” will always garner my attention. Southern, a Wake Forest graduate with strong ongoing ties to his alma [...]
