Book Reviews
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 [...]
Children of Dust
Children of Dust by Marlin Barton Regal House Publishing, 2021 Paperback: $19.95; Special Edition Hardcover: $28.95 Genre: Fiction; Novel Review by Frye Gaillard With his latest book, Children of Dust, Alabama novelist Marlin Barton has taken his place with the finest Southern writers of our times – with the likes of Ron Rash or William Gay – and if anything, that is understating the case. When it comes to understanding the human condition, and its intricate intertwining with the history of [...]
Fugitives of the Heart by William Gay Livingston Press, The University of West Alabama, 2021 E-Book: $19.95; Hardcover: $26.95 Genre: Contemporary Fiction Review by Edward Journey According to William Gay lore, when he first encountered a dictionary, he read it from cover to cover. A reader might reasonably speculate that he spent his writing career trying to use up all of those words. Here’s a horrible example: the protagonist “… screamed a cry of outrage and bereavement and utter revulsion as [...]
This Ditch-Walking Love
This Ditch-Walking Love by James Braziel Livingston Press: The University of West Alabama, 2021 Hardcover: $29.95; Paperback: $19.95 Genre: Contemporary Fiction Review by Edward Journey James Braziel’s This Ditch-Walking Love is an impressionistic collection of short stories and sketches exploring themes of strife and defeat in rural Alabama, near the Locust Fork. The location is described as “not a county of rivers – just rills and rivulets that widen into creeks.” Some stories in the collection are hypnotic collages of time, [...]
Searching for Jimmy Page
Searching for Jimmy Page by Christy Alexander Hallberg Livingston Press: The University of West Alabama, 2021 Paperback: $18.95 Genre: Fiction Review by Frye Gaillard With her new novel, Searching for Jimmy Page, Christy Alexander Hallberg takes her place as one of the bright new stars in Southern fiction. She has given us a coming-of-age story based on a premise that could have fallen anywhere between sad cliché and literary page turner. In Hallberg’s deft and confident hands, it is most assuredly [...]
Poet Warrior
Poet Warrior by Joy Harjo W.W. Norton, 2021 Hardcover: $25.00 Genre: Nonfiction; Memoir Review by Pam Kingsbury Joy Harjo’s Poet Warrior is a graduate course in what it means to find healing through poetry, as well as to live as a compassionate human. Describing herself as “being equally left and right-brained," Joy Harjo has made her life’s work as a writer and a teacher, as well as a daughter, mother, grandmother, and now matriarch, taking up the ideals of poetic justice, [...]
The Speckled Beauty
The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and his People, Lost and Found by Rick Bragg Knopf, 2021 Hardcover: $26.00 Genre: Nonfiction; Memoir Review by Tucker Coombe The opening of Rick Bragg’s new memoir depicts a gorgeous, luxuriant landscape—“tangled pines and mountain pasture, fractured by dappled sunlight…blue jays, yellowhammers, and an emerald blur of hummingbirds”—that provides a stunning, if unlikely, backdrop for the author’s own desolation. The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and his People, Lost and Found opens in the autumn of 2017. [...]
Grace and Grit
Grace and Grit: My Fight for Equal Pay at Goodyear and Beyond By Lilly Ledbetter and Lanier Scott Isom Crown Archetype, 2012 Nonfiction Reviewed by Pam Kingsbury Lilly Ledbetter did not set out to change the workplace; she just wanted to help contribute to her family’s finances, help provide more for her children, and achieve financial stability. Like many Alabamians of her generation, she was born in a small town (Possum Trot, Alabama) and lived in a house without electricity and running water, [...]
