The twenty-one stories in the collection, all by post-World War II Alabama authors, run from the traditional to the experimental. Arranged according to birth order of the writers, the collection leads off with “The Byzantine Riddle,” the comic masterpiece of Eugene Walter, whom some have called the funniest man in Alabama. The greatest appeal of the story to me is Walter’s ability to reproduce with unfailing accuracy the speech of a group of Mobile women who well understand that language is not simply a utilitarian instrument, but, equally important, a means of entertaining one’s listeners.

Christmas is a holiday that evokes feelings of angst and joy, which makes it a perfect topic for writers. Christmas Is a Season! 2008 has twenty-eight short stories and personal essays by writers from throughout the nation. It is edited by Linda Busby Parker, who highlighted writing communities, especially her own, by inviting them to write about Christmas. Many of their voices come from places in their hearts where emotions are as tangled as a wad of string lights.

Cities of Flesh and the Dead, Blakely’s third book, is composed of five sections which hold nineteen poems, many of them long and sequenced. Some are in memoriam poems for other poets: Anthony Hecht, Lynda Hull, William Matthews, and Herbert Morris. Because of this, an elegiac tone runs through the book, but it is by no means the only note struck.

Some first books are revised MFA theses, and some are wonderful. The Boatloads, however, is so unified in its themes and in its sets of poems, and conveys such maturity in each poem, that I believe it is shaped more by the author’s obsessions than by chronology of the poems.

In the Company of Owls by Peter Huggins will instantly grab the attention of the reader. It is a delightful, easy to read adventurous story of courage and family loyalty. It also employs humor and wisdom. While reading this novel you can visualize life on a dairy farm from sunrise to sunset. Huggins’ descriptive metaphor such as “hugging a pillow and listening to the crack and pop of the cedar as it glowed and burned in the stone fireplace” gives a feeling of peaceful coexistence with nature. All is well at the end of the day. Unfortunately for the Cash family, their peaceful life will have frightening consequences.

Although priced separately, these books are presented as a pair. The first listing above is a sequel to the second, which is a reissue of a 1986 novel published by Doubleday. Other previous editions of Rommel and the Rebel were published by Bantam in 1987 and Yoknapatawpha Press in 1992. The idea to write a novel about a fabricated journey to America by the German military leader Erwin Rommel, who had distinguished himself in World War I before achieving fame as the wily World War II Field Marshall known as the Desert Fox, came from a press account of a visit to Mississippi by a group of unnamed military men from Germany in the late 1930s. Wells has drawn a convincing parallel between the military tactics of this colorful, well-developed character and those of the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest.

With Moundville John Blitz presents readers a characterization of a place that by all rights and accounts is as much a national monument as the colossal undertaking of Mount Rushmore and also as invaluable an international heirloom of the human family as the pyramids on the Giza plateau. He develops this profile of the park in three distinct segments: 1) an examination of its modern history; 2) an explication of the scientific methodologies and efforts that have shed so much light on its pre-history; 3) the humanization of this pre-historic data in story form. Finally, Blitz caps this biography of the monument with a brief chapter consisting of the most relevant data of all: an outline and description of what potential visitors should seek and expect when planning their next trip to this remarkable site.

Ace Atkins’ success in Wicked City is not in the plot. That could not be altered much. His success as a novelist is in characterization, in the creation of individual scenes, and, most importantly, in his shocking, disgusting portrait of Phenix City, Alabama, itself. All the gambling was rigged, vice was a way of life, and even complaining about the loaded dice could get your throat slit and your body dropped through a trap door in the floor of the bar, into the swirling, muddy Chattahoochee River.

The famous evangelists in America’s history differed somewhat in doctrine, and were widely disparate in education, oratorical style, and business acumen. However, they shared a desire to preach the gospel to as many people as they possibly could, and had the ambition and commitment to make this goal their life’s work. David T. Morgan traces the path of revivalism in America’s history, beginning with Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield in the eighteenth century and ending with the modern-day televangelists. Charles Finney, Dwight L. Moody, Sam Jones, Billy Sunday, and Aimee Semple McPherson, along with Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, and others “contributed to shaping, to a significant extent, the mosaic that is contemporary America.”

The first two books form a continuous novel, a “saga” if you will. Wiregrass, Grits & Murder is a kind of fairy tale, with a poor but worthy young man transformed into the missing heir of a wealthy tycoon, who pops up throughout the saga with his limo and bodyguard.

Imagine, if you will, a mom that’s a former Opryland Hotel cook but now a pastry chef in a four star New York hotel, twelve-year-old twins—a soccer whiz son and an aspiring fashion designer daughter—a screenplay writing absentee dad who’s in Iceland, a cat that is typically draped on a twin’s shoulders, and a potbellied pig named Rumpy that can read (but can’t Google) and disguises herself in a dog costume.

No, this is not a Rod Serling introduction to an episode of The Twilight Zone. This is Jimmy Buffett’s most recent novel, Swine Not? A Novel Pig Tale.

Another book about Auburn football by an Auburn alumnus. This time it’s Paul Hemphill celebrating glorious victories, legendary coaches, and noteworthy performances of student athletes on the field of honor—especially the field known as the Iron Bowl. But what about objectivity? Hemphill admits up front that he can’t be objective. And what was First Draft thinking when it sent me the book to me to review? I’m an Auburn alumnus from the class of 1960, which means I was a student in 1957 when Auburn won its only national championship and Hemphill was sports editor of The Auburn Plainsman. All that aside, don’t we need to be encouraging people in our state to attend plays, read non-rhyming poetry, and become more involved in activities that increase their cultural awareness than in reinforcing their preoccupation with revenue producing sports? So do you really think I’m going to tell you that a coffee-table book about football advances the literary arts? Well, yes, actually.

If you are looking for a different type of civil rights story or if you are seeking a different type of sports tale, then Walk-On is the book for you. Unlike many memoirs connected to the era, Walk-On is not a “nuts and bolts” civil rights tale about politics, social unrest, or any of the usual suspects. Those elements are certainly there to be sure, but this is a resolutely personal story written after the height of the most extreme upheavals by someone who was not directly involved in those facets of the movement. Those elements most often lurk in the background of Gossom’s world until they inevitably rise to the fore and force him to deal with them directly.

As the follow-up to his first young adult novel Longleaf, author Roger Reid offers Space, the story of teen sleuth Jason Caldwell and his hair-raising discovery of international espionage at a Huntsville, Alabama, observatory. Seizing an opportunity to educate, Reid shares scientific enlightenment while engaging the reader with mysteries that lurk in each chapter of the tales he tells.

From the opening sentences, you know you’re in the hands of a good storyteller. Dale County retired district judge Val McGee, who has served as president of both the Alabama Historical Association and the Friends of the Alabama Archives, is the author of several books of history. His ambitious, impressively researched first novel is set in and around the town of Selma just before, during, and after the Civil War.

“What are words worth?” the poet of The Calpocalypse asks—and the answer is “not less than everything.” Maurice Gandy’s rollicking linguistic “coming-of-age” epic/ poem/narrative/myth/journey/beach-life 1960s-early 1970s California experience is a virtuoso tour-de-force pop-culture history/performance that marks Gandy as a significant poetic voice not only in the Alabama poetry scene, but nationally and internationally. The Calpocalypse won an iUniverse Publisher’s Award and a USA Book News Recognition, and it was displayed in the 2008 London Book Fair.

John Pritchard has followed his first novel Junior Ray (2005) with the further adventures of his eponymous hero in The Yazoo Blues. The place is the Mississippi Delta, south of Memphis, along Route 61—a place of levees, oxbows, and now casinos built over water. The charming but foul-mouthed hillbilly hero, retired as sheriff’s deputy—he insists he’s a “law-enforcement professional”—now works parking security at a casino. Gone is the unsuccessful search for a shell-shocked veteran of World War II of the first book, along with the somewhat tedious excerpts from the soldier’s diary. Now the picaresque adventures are more wide-ranging, exploring the sexual peccadilloes of modern Mississippi and Memphis residents.

Who is the Creator? What is the Creator’s plan? In William H. Drinkard’s first novel, he explores these universal questions. Writing in the science-fiction genre, which is ideally suited for the examination of society and civilization, the author takes his readers on an epic journey where the principal characters are challenged with the possible extinction of their race. In facing this challenge, the characters get an unprecedented backstage look at the forces affecting the evolution of their people and the social structure that drives their cultural progression on Elom, a planet near the center of the
galaxy.

Auburn graduate Prioleau Alexander is one hilarious writer. At age forty-one, he walked away from his job as a well-paid advertising executive to explore the underbelly of the employment world by hiring on for a series of low-paying jobs to write a book about his experiences, You Want Fries with That? A White-Collar Burnout Experiences Life at Minimum Wage.

One of its back-cover reviewers states that Ted Dunagan’s young adult novel, A Yellow Watermelon, reminds him of To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn. The novel is squarely in Twain territory, but that of Tom Sawyer rather than of Huckleberry Finn. By the same token, it only comes within shouting distance of Harper Lee territory. That is, it is an engaging and well-told adventure story....

William Borden’s novel, Dancing With Bears, is a very odd book about the extremely odd business of living. The publisher’s Web site informs us that Livingston Press is hot on the trail of the quirky and odd, always on the hunt for "offbeat literature." Well, Livingston bagged a stuffed and mounted trophy loony-toon with this one, and you just might like it.

Howard Jones, University Research Professor of History at the University of Alabama and the author of Mutiny on the Amistad, tells this story not in a single page but in nearly hypnotic detail. He has researched the events with great care and thoroughness, using now-declassified records from the CIA, Senate committee hearings, and a host of other sources. If there is a flaw in this book, it is that Jones is sometimes too detailed, occasionally repetitious. I think I know why. Jones probably feared that if he did not prove the truth of the assertions he was making to the reader, beyond a reasonable doubt, no one would believe him. The story is too preposterous.

From the publisher: “Through a Passing Cloud is a selection of Bobbie Martin Parker’s ‘most personal, most intimate’ poems. While there are variations in style, theme, and voice, they are united by their spirit-based focus on redemption and forgiveness. Ms. Parker’s uncompromising poems share tender, affecting experiences, address eternal truths through multiple voices, and reduce social fronts to ‘see-through barriers of uselessness.’ Her rhythmic, flowing verse speaks to social, environmental, and relationship issues facing all of us each and every day. Subjects such as the longing for a childhood home, fond reminiscences on a dear friend, nature, and the unassailable bond between siblings are beautifully illuminated.” 

From the author: “Heart, Soul, and Rhyme is a skillful, poetic, collective body of work. This is my second book of published poetry. I pray that it will not be the last book of my work and that there will be many more to follow. I am 28 years old and from Alexander City, Alabama. I have been writing poetry since 1998, and I thank God for my creative mind state. I also thank the Lord for my inspiration…to bring a new poetic creation. It is a great pleasure to share my world with all who care.”

From the publisher: “In his debut collection of published poetry, Leroy G. Carey shows why his is a unique new voice in the world of poetry. Writing on a variety of subjects including love, romance, imagination, color, and laughter, Mr. Carey draws from a wealth of personal experience to make readers feel true emotions.”