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Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt
By Hasan Kwame Jeffries   
Reviewed by Nancy Wilstach

It should come as no surprise that Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries’ account of the struggles and hardships faced by African-American Lowndes Countians is a well-researched and scholarly work. After all, he is an assistant professor of history at Ohio State University. Unexpected, however, are the heartache and anger the story evokes.
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Mark Twain on the Move: A Travel Reader
By Alan Gribben  and Jeffrey Alan Melton, eds. 
Reviewed by Elaine Hughes

Mark Twain on the Move: A Travel Reader, edited by Alan Gribben and Jeffrey Alan Melton, is an appropriate tribute to the literary figure many think the greatest American writer. On the occasion of the centenary of Twain’s death, this collection offers reflection on his early career and his first successes. The collection includes excerpts from all five of Twain’s travel writings—The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), A Tramp Abroad (1880), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and Following the Equator (1897)—and commentary by the editors on the genre and on Twain’s mastery of it.
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Broken Wing
By Thomas Lakeman   
Reviewed by Don Noble

It is rude to tell a lot of the plot when talking about thrillers, and I couldn’t if I wanted to. There is simply too much. This novel has executions and assassination attempts; suicide bombers and pre-planted bombs; secret identities; moles and turncoats; gorgeous, dangerous women in tailored suits; a villain’s lair right out of James Bond; high-tech computerized bugging and tracking devices; and twenty-first-century weapons you just won’t believe, although, sadly, I do.
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The Donkey of Tarsus: His Tales About the Apostle Paul
By Adele Colvin;  Illustrated by Peyton Carmichael 
Reviewed by Book Noted

From the author: In The Donkey of Tarsus, Saul (later “Paul”) asks his family for one of their donkeys when he sets out for Jerusalem to help defend the Jewish faith from the growing belief in Jesus as the Messiah. His father gladly gives him one that has been a troublemaker. This young donkey is very excited to be leaving the tent business behind to go off on an adventure with Saul. However, the night before he is to leave, he is stunned to learn from his mother that it was his great-uncle who carried Jesus to Jerusalem! He is fearful if this were to be known that he would be left behind.
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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: The Big Read: Alabama Edition
By Mark Twain;  Foreword by Alan Gribben 
Reviewed by Elaine Hughes

Few Americans will admit to not having read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a classic tale of childhood by Mark Twain, literary icon. And though decades may have passed since readers discovered Twain’s characters, they still can recall vividly the memorable fence-whitewashing scene, the witnessing of a murder by Tom and his friend Huck, the fear of Tom and Becky Thatcher while lost in the cave where the murderer is hiding. Published in 1876, Twain’s depiction of the adventures of childhood—both fantasy and real-life—has become much more than “a book for boys, pure & simple,” as he had planned. The story has survived as a tribute to the innocence of childhood, as a reflection on the pains of growing up, as a recollection of the rural and small-town life of a now-distant past. The Big Read: Alabama Edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer invites all Alabamians, young and old, to rediscover and to revisit this treasure of American literature.
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Portions
By Hank Lazer   
Reviewed by Sue B. Walker

Hank Lazer’s fifteenth book of poetry, Portions, is a “language house a / moving place that / feeds & carries,” a linguistic portioning that addresses how it is “to be”; it is “a way / to see out / to learn of / the world we / miraculous stand upon” (“House,” “Nature”). The book is an “invitation into a / new way of / saying (“Invitation”) that is in keeping with Heidegger’s claim that “language is the house of Being” (On The Way To Language). Portions is a “secret & saving / way through the / world in a thin book” (“Way”).
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Enchanted Evening Barbie and the Second Coming
By Rheta Grimsley Johnson   
Reviewed by Julia Oliver

The French noun "memoir" looks and sounds mysterious and inviting. It’s all but replaced the solid term "autobiography." Yet frequently, the most attention-getting books in this genre present a victim’s viewpoint of a life filled with horrific situations. That is not the case here. Enchanted Evening Barbie and the Second Coming is a testimonial of life as an optimistic, ambitious adventure from a spunky, greatly gifted and disciplined writer. It’s also a paean to a nurturing circle of family, lovers and friends, mentors and colleagues.
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Leaving Gee's Bend
By Irene Latham   
Reviewed by Beth Wilder

As a crow flies, Camden, Alabama, is only about forty miles from the community of Gee’s Bend. But for ten-year-old Ludelphia Bennett, it might as well be on the other side of the earth. Ludelphia has never left the safety of her poor but closely-knit community, and she has no idea what lurks in the wider world. Set during the trying times of the Great Depression, Leaving Gee’s Bend chronicles the dangerous and exciting journey that Ludelphia must make to save her mother’s life.
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Alabama Football: Stallings to Saban: A Roller Coaster Ride
By Donald F. Staffo   
Reviewed by Don Noble

Donald Staffo is chairman of the Department of Health and Physical Education at Stillman College and this is his seventh book in the field of sport and physical fitness. Staffo has covered the Alabama football program for more than twenty-five years for local publications and for the Associated Press, and he is undoubtedly knowledgeable. He is also the author of a previous Alabama book, Bama After Bear, that covers the years under Curry and Perkins. Here, I thought, might be a volume that was not a 200-page hallelujah chorus of praise for the wonders of the Alabama football program. And this is to some extent the case.
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Equivocal Blessings
By Mary Carol Moran   
Reviewed by Melissa Dickson Blackburn

Strewn with frequent sonnets and the occasional villanelle—as well as historical, literary, and personal reflections—Mary Carol Moran’s Equivocal Blessings delves into the penance we all must pay to the loved, the lost, the dead, and the remembered. Divided into three sections—“Clearing,” “Breathe With Me,” and “Strong Bones”—Equivocal Blessings features diverse approaches and narrative themes....

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Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power
By David T. Beito  and Linda Royster Beito 
Reviewed by Nancy Wilstach

Talk about the idol with feet of clay: Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard’s character flaws were in proportion to his virtues. The Beitos have painted their portrait of this mesmerizing man without trying to gloss over his flaws.
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Haunted Birmingham
By Alan Brown   
Reviewed by Danny Gamble

Alan Brown’s title Haunted Birmingham is a bit of a misnomer since his book visits haunts not only in the Magic City, but also in Bessemer, Columbiana, Jasper, and Montevallo. The book fairly drips ectoplasm. All the wonders of the invisible world are here—the orbs, the shadows, the footsteps, even a haunted mummy. And some of these specters remind us that the metaphysical is not so far from the physical.
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Lizards and Crocodilians of the Southeast; Snakes of the Southeast
By Whit Gibbons,  Judy Greene, Tony Mills, and Mike Dorcas
Reviewed by Don Noble

These are truly beautiful books, filled
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Drew: Poems from Blue Water
By Robert Gray   
Reviewed by Russ Kesler

Robert Gray’s book Drew: Poems from Blue Water straddles two genres. In its subject matter and narrative arc, it is a memoir of the life and death of Gray’s older brother Drew. Broken into seventeen discrete sections, the story centers around the family’s cabin at a central Alabama lake. Yet that story is told via a series of poems, each section comprised of one to four poems. As memoir, the book is a moving and compelling tale.
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Critical Insights: To Kill a Mockingbird
By Don Noble, ed.   
Reviewed by Book Noted

From the publisher: Edited by Alabama native and Lee scholar Don Noble, this volume brings together some of the very best criticism available on Lee’s timeless classic. Overview essays by Nancy Grisham Anderson and Gurdip Panesar consider the cultural contexts surrounding the novel and the critical reception of Lee’s work. Neil Heims offers a close examination of the novel as wisdom literature while Teresa Godwin Phelps and Thomas L. Shaffer consider the lessons being taught in the novel. Critic Matthew J. Bolton suggests looking at Lee’s novel as an introduction to life in the South with an eye towards understanding Faulkner while Laurie Champion examines the notion of visual perception as a metaphor that is carried throughout the novel.
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Symmetry
By Joyce Scarbrough   
Reviewed by Delores Jordan

Joyce Scarbrough is the author of three books, True Blue Forever, Different Roads, and now this best of the three, Symmetry. One can see her skill as an author in the manner that she puts the reader into each scene and shows the dynamics of a marriage going sour but with both people truly loving each other.
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HealthSouth: The Wagon to Disaster
By Aaron Beam  with Chris Warner 
Reviewed by H. F. Lippincott

Aaron Beam, co-founder (in 1980) and comptroller of HealthSouth, has written an account of his involvement with CEO Richard Scrushy, who was convicted in 2006 of bribery, conspiracy, and fraud. Although Beam left the company in 2003, eventually to become a whistle blower, he too was convicted as a felon and served three months in the federal prison camp in Montgomery. Since, Beam has spoken widely at business schools about the morality of corporate finance. This book spells out the details of his rags-to-riches story—and back to rags again: Beam now operates a one-man lawn service in Lower Alabama.

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Within the Shadow of a Man
By Dennis Sampson   
Reviewed by Book Noted

From the publisher: Within the Shadow of a Man is a work of collision—of art and sense, of morality and mortality, of logic and dream. In Within the Shadow of a Man Dennis Sampson manages, once again, to join the cosmos with the very moments of what we call our lives.
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Blessings and Curses
By Anne Whitehouse   
Reviewed by Book Noted

From the publisher: Blessings and Curses by New York poet Anne Whitehouse is a series of [twenty-four] curses and [forty] blessings that cover territory both familiar and deeply personal. Both curses and blessings are quietly illuminating, neither too full of sadness nor of joy rather a perfect balance of what a life brings and what a perceptive heart has gleaned. [Whitehouse] writes with a sure hand, schooled in the craft of poetry so that what she has to impart has the right language to say it without interruption.
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Dead Letters
By Alan May;  Illustrations by Tom Wegrzynowski and Alan May 
Reviewed by Book Noted

From the book jacket: The voice in these poems is powerfully deep and inside, as if it’s coming up from the bottom of a well. Yet it is also a recognizable voice, one we have in our own heads at certain moments. Alan May has created an echo-chamber of lyric consciousness, not in service of solipsism, but for the purpose of communion. These poems disturb and sadden and charm, but above all they keep us with them. The illustrations, by Tom Wegrzynowski and May, are as other-worldly as the poems, yet the art of this moving and elegant book convinces the reader the other world is where we do our living. Dead Letters is a work of great beauty and force, of intelligence and stark humility.

—Maurice Manning

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Dark Village Haiku
By Jeremy M. Downes   
Reviewed by Book Noted

From the publisher: The Alabama State Poetry Society’s Annual John and Miriam Morris Memorial Chapbook Competition 2007 winner is a thought provoking collection of poetry rich with beauty and artistry.
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live, from the emergency room
By Lori Lasseter Hamilton   
Reviewed by Book Noted

From the publisher: This is an amazing group of powerful poems drawn from [Lori Lasseter Hamilton’s] experiences as a rape survivor.
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A Blue Voice Crying in the Wilderness of a Red State
By David Morgan   
Reviewed by Book Noted

From the publisher: Letters to the editor provide concerned citizens with a means of conveying their thoughts—positive and negative—about what goes on in our society at all levels. David T. Morgan, the author and compiler of the letters in this book, has strong opinions on matters national, state, and local, and he feels compelled to make his views known. Consequently, he has written numerous letters to the editor over the last two decades....
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