Book Reviews

By R.B. Chesterton (aka Carolyn Haines)
Pegasus Crime, 2013
$24.95, Hardcover

Fiction

Reviewed by Frye Gaillard

Throughout her remarkably successful career, Carolyn Haines has long been a master of the page-turning mystery. Her latest novel, The Darkling, which is, incredibly, one of more than sixty she has written, is no exception. This supernatural, white-knuckling whodunit, written under the pseudonym of R.B. Chesterton, is set in the fishing village of Coden, Alabama, where the wealthy members of the Henderson family have moved into an estate called Belle Fleur. As recent arrivals from California, the Hendersons are seeking the peace and quiet promised by the languid beauty of the coast. What they find instead are heartache and terror, intensified and made more mysterious by the haunting unfamiliarity of the place. Read the complete review…

By Elizabeth Benedict, ed.
Algonquin Books, 2013
$15.95, Paper; 8.77, eBook

Anthology

Reviewed by Julia Oliver

A sub-title, Thirty-One Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most, provides dimensional definition to this collection of specially commissioned essays. The contributors, all well-known journalists and/or fiction writers, include Montgomery native Judith Hillman Paterson, who is scheduled to present a program at the 2013 Alabama Book Festival on Saturday, April 20. Among highly recognizable bylines are those of Ann Hood, Mary Gordon, Rita Dove, Marge Piercy, Joyce Carol Oates, Lisa See, and the book’s editor, Elizabeth Benedict. Although it’s logical to assume publication was timed to come out near Mother’s Day, each of the thirty-one authors has risen to the occasion of writing eloquently on-theme without over-sentimentalizing. Read the complete review…

By Frye Gaillard
NewSouth Books, 2013
$27.95, Hardcover; $9.99 eBook

Nonfiction

Reviewed by Don Noble

Frye Gaillard, author of some twenty volumes and winner of both the Lillian Smith Award and the Clarence Cason Award, is solidly in this latter tradition, writing here with insight and feeling about the books that mattered.

The book offers “eleven essays featuring thirty-odd books.” He understands the list is “deeply personal and purely my own.” Such lists always are. Considering that Gaillard’s work has usually been concerned with questions of civil rights—integration, mandatory school busing—with occasional side trips into the world of country music and NASCAR and that his lifelong heroes are Senator Robert F. Kennedy and President Jimmy Carter, most of his choices are not too surprising. Read the complete review…

By Kathleen Driskell
Illustrated by AJ Reinhart
Fleur-de-Lis Explorations, 2012
$8, Paper

Poetry

Reviewed by Lindsay Hodgens

Thanks to the recent superhero movie craze, comics are big again. There are entire conferences devoted to comics scholarship, and comics (or, alternatively, “graphic novels”) have become a popular subject for English courses. What Kathleen Driskell brings to the table is a spin on the image-driven genre we are already familiar with. Simply put, it ain’t your grandma’s comic book. Interestingly enough, Driskell’s Peck and Pock: A Graphic Poem comes in the form of an elongated, slim booklet reminiscent of a comic book. The cover art—droplets of rain highlighted against a windowpane—is powered by hues of white, gray, and black. This dark theme continues into the rest of the book’s paratext. Stark black dominates the title and credit pages and acts as the background for the area between and behind panels, otherwise known as the gutter. This sets an excellent mood for Driskell’s dark and hypnotic poetry. Driskell’s writing shines its brightest when it is fixated on the smallest details, like rotten apples being swept along in a current and young faces pressed against windows. While reading, I had the constant sense of being taken aback by these small, strange pieces of beauty. Read the complete review…

By Willie James King
Tebot Bach, 2013
$16, Paper

Poetry

Reviewed by Tony Crunk

Willie James King’s fourth collection of poetry admirably continues the hallmarks of his previous work. He doesn’t just integrate the public and the personal, the political and the contemplative, but explores the myriad ways in which these dichotomies reflect and inform each other. Read the complete review…

By Frank “Doc” Adams and Burgin Mathews
The University of Alabama Press, 2012
$34.95, Hardcover & eBook

Nonfiction

Reviewed by Edward Reynolds

Birmingham’s Frank “Doc” Adams has led an extraordinary musical life. As a teen, he played saxophone with Sun Ra’s early orchestra and later worked with Duke Ellington’s band. In Doc: The Story of a Birmingham Jazz Man, the 85-year-old Adams shares an intimately in-depth narrative of his life-long love affair playing and teaching music. Loaded with barely restrained enthusiasm, his voice leaps off the page with wonder and exhilaration as he tells of pursuing and finding his dream. As a storyteller, he’s every bit as entertaining as the magnificent notes he coaxes from his sax and clarinet. Read the complete review…

By Rodney Jones
Houghton Mifflin, 2011
$22, Hardcover

Poetry

Reviewed by Jennifer Horne

Rodney Jones’ 2006 collection Salvation Blues: 100 Poems, 1985-2005 is more than the now-standard late-mid-career new-and-collected; it’s a book you can browse through, read start to finish, dip into, or perhaps even open a page at random and point at a line blindfolded and still hit pay dirt, essence of Rodney Jones.

His new book, Imaginary Logic, is Jones’ ninth book of poetry. In it one finds again his signature combination of the vernacular particular and the highfalutin’ abstract, a mix that often surprises, as though your plumber were to begin quoting St. Augustine while buried under your kitchen sink. Read the complete review…

By Bert Hitchcock, ed.
Solomon & George Publishers, 2012
$20, Paper

Anthology

Reviewed by Don Noble

At a time when independent bookstores are going out of business all over America, the Gnu’s Room –it’s a pun—in Auburn, Alabama, makes a lot of sense. It is organized as a nonprofit bookstore, mainly used books, and as a local center for the arts: literary, visual, and performing. As part of its mission, the Gnu Arts has established a nonprofit imprint, Solomon and George Publishers, named in honor of Olivia Pienezza Solomon, short story writer and folklorist, and Anne Carroll George, poet and, perhaps more famously, the author of the highly successful mystery/cozies The Southern Sisters series. Ms. Solomon and Ms. George graduated from UA, but Solomon taught at Auburn, and the papers of both writers are now in the Auburn library. This anthology, the Solomon and George Publishers debut volume, is, appropriately, devoted to writings by people with an Auburn or east Alabama connection and all seem to be set in Auburn or, at least, not discernibly elsewhere.
http://www.writersforum.org/news_and_reviews/review_archives.html/article/2013/03/11/chinaberries-crows-an-anthology/813845

By Anne Whitehouse
Dos Madres Press, 2012
$16, Paper
Poetry
Reviewed by Mary Kaiser
Describing an aging woman, Anne Whitehouse writes, “to go on living / she would have to give up / who she was until this season.” This eloquent statement of loss and adaptation could be an epigraph to Anne Whitehouse’s latest collection, The Refrain, poems that locate moments of transformation when the old life mutates irrevocably into a new form, moments of terror and confusion followed by clarity and the possibility of a new beginning. A house struck by lightning, a bed-bug infestation, the onset of dementia, a bird trapped in a house, a child trapped inside her parents’ squabbles—all of these moments effect a mysterious change, a new and clearer vision. Like novelists Virginia Woolf and Laurie Colwin, Whitehouse scans quotidian detail for her metaphors, and like them, she always selects the resonant image that, without commentary, gives meaning to the whole. Read the complete review…

By H. Brandt Ayers
NewSouth Books, 2013
$29.95, Hardcover; $9.99 eBook

Nonfiction

Reviewed by Bill Plott

H. Brandt Ayers, longtime editor and publisher at The Anniston Star, has written a memoir with a unique perspective on his beloved Southland. Writing with historical perception, political awareness, and abiding sensitivity, he has given a history of the South’s painful road from Civil War to the latest New South, a land of culture and prosperity, one in being with the nation yet still maintaining some semblance of the gentle, polite past. His narrative brings us through the hard scrabble years of the Great Depression, the tumult of the civil rights era, and the Republican takeover. Read the complete review…

By Bram Riddlebarger
Livingston Press, 2012
$28, Hardcover; $16.95, Paper

Fiction

Reviewed by Lindsay Hodgens, 2012

If you are looking for a novel that is absolutely appropriate for the times, Bram Riddlebarger’s Earplugs may be exactly what you want. Set in a small Appalachian town, the story follows its main character—who is never named—as he interacts with his quickly modernizing community and deals with the loss of both his best friend and his girlfriend. Then again, “interacts” may be the wrong word for it, as the protagonist responds to the changes by locating and then constantly wearing a set of earplugs. In an age of ever-increasing connectivity, this action makes a loud statement that is as salient in the real world as it is in the novel. Read the complete review…

Tohopeka: Rethinking the Creek War and the War of 1812
By Kathyrn E. Holland Braund, ed.
A Pebble Hill Book by the University of Alabama Press, 2012
34.95, Paper; $29.95 eBook

Nonfiction

Reviewed by Pam Kingsbury

The Battle of Horseshoe Bend, also known as the Battle of Tohopeka, was a turning point in Creek (Muskogee), Alabama, and American History. Set within the larger context of a newly established America, continuing clashes between the settlers and the tribes for land, and the War of 1812, the Battle at Tohopeka made Andrew Jackson a national hero with both military and political clout. Tohopeka: Rethinking the Creek War and the War of 1812 offers multiple viewpoints on the history, archaeology, and preservation of Horseshoe Bend. Read the complete review…

By Carey Scott Wilkerson
New Plains Press, 2012
$16.95, Paper

Poetry

Reviewed by Aaron Sanders

Such a collection as Ars Minotaurica flies so close to the sun that its poetic parts don’t melt as much as dissolve. The poet, Carey Scott Wilkerson, then recycles what’s left over into more poems, and the reader gets the sense that the poet would be content repeating this process ad infinitum. Read the complete review…