Edited by Kathryn H. Braund
University of Alabama Press, 2022
Hardcover: $54.95; Kindle: $52.20
Genre: Nonfiction; Nature Writing; Essays
By Jace Rose Malmquist
Some of the authors in The Attention of a Traveller are interested in the historical and political contexts of the time, place and space that Bartram existed in; others follow the obvious thrills of his wild encounters with alligators or the more subtle ones, from the comforting shape of the serpentine lines he drew (Athens 148) and his signature technique of “hatching in small patterns” (Fry 122) to the pure joy of seeing one of his lovely drawings for the first time, like Bartram’s celestial lily: the Ixea caelestina (119). Taken as a whole, the collection feels cohesive and complete with one voice answering back or running parallel with the one preceding, or another that joined after. The book is like a long and unhurried evening conversation with each person holding a drink; it’s about Bartram—his discoveries and storytelling—but it's also about what it means to be a person faced with divisive times and changing environments.
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By Imani Perry
Ecco / Harper Collins, 2022
Hardcover: $28.99
Genre: Nonfiction; History; Travel
By Edward Journey
Imani Perry’s South to America: A Journey below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation is an important and timely book. I savored most everything about it, but one passage stands out as my favorite: At a dinner, Perry has a conversation with Howell Raines, former executive editor at The New York Times and author of My Soul Is Rested, an oral history of the Civil Rights Movement. She tells him she’s writing a book about the South and he asks her where she’s from. When she responds that she’s originally from Birmingham, he asks what neighborhood. She says, “Ensley.” She writes that Raines’s “eyes widened, then glistened.” His response: “I’m from Ensley, too.”
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By Maria Kuznetsova
Random House, 2021
Hardcover: $27.00; Kindle Edition: $7.99
Genre: Fiction; Novel
Review by Rachel Houghton
Maria Kuznetsova’s Something Unbelievable is a multi-faceted tale that spans continents and generations. It is layered with themes of family, grief, loyalty, and identity. The narrative bounces between Larissa, an eighty-year-old matriarch who lives in Kiev, and Natasha, Larissa’s only granddaughter who lives with her husband and new baby in Manhattan. During their weekly Skype dates, Larissa tells Natasha the story of how her family survived relocating to the Ural Mountains during the WWII Nazi invasion of Ukraine. Larissa also begins to suspect that all is not right with Natasha’s transition to motherhood. In the end, this concern, and Natasha’s invitation to see her new one-woman play, convince Larissa to travel across the world to check up on her beloved granddaughter and meet her new great granddaughter.
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By James Seay Brown Jr.
The University of Alabama Press, 2022
Hardcover: $39.95; E Book: $39.95
Genre: Nonfiction; Natural History; Folklore
Review 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 taught him about these places and things, other crafts, and life itself. Brown, a retired Professor Emeritus of History from Samford University, is a committed teacher with the desire to share the knowledge he has gained over a lifetime.
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By Christopher Shaffer
Hellgate Press, 2021
Paperback: $12.95
Genre: Nonfiction; Memoir
Review 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 University, spent the summer of 1991 in Mannheim, Germany, for a study abroad program. Admitting that his plan was “to study some, but travel more,” the summer became a transformative experience for the undergraduate abroad. A visit to Prague dispels his “grey and drab” illusion of what the former Soviet Eastern Bloc was like. His lushly entertaining descriptions of Prague and its abundance of Dixieland jazz bands make me want to visit, see, and hear those sights and sounds for myself. We are fortunate to have the opportunity to live the experience vicariously through Shaffer’s detailed and incisive memories.
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By Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker
NewSouth Books, 2022
Hardcover: $22.00
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 the late journalist John Egerton published in 1974, shortly before the Watergate investigation forced President Nixon to resign in disgrace. He considered possible connections between Egerton’s observations and reflections and the current moment in our nation’s history. He then approached Gaillard, who has published several books with NewSouth, about writing a sequel to The Americanization of Dixie. Gaillard, liking the idea, invited his University of South Alabama colleague and friend Cynthia Tucker to co-write the book with him (Gaillard is Writer in Residence there, and Tucker is Journalist in Residence). Tucker accepted Gaillard’s invitation, and the project began.
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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 exemplify the racial inequities persisting in our country today.
By Nabila Lovelace
YesYes Books, 2018
Paperback: $18.00
Genre: Poetry
Review by Jace Rose Malmquist
Lovelace is a first-generation poet from Queens, and her work has a queenly bearing: she breathes in air and breathes out elegance. Her debut collection Sons of Achilles explores violence and intimacy and the shared space between them, showing that there isn’t a clean line or a clear divide among them. Things are blurred, messy. She shows us wounds that can and cannot be seen: how she is “singed to the bone” with her left foot scarred “in new heels” (“Ugly”), and as she walks you through images of herself in old rooms, she makes you think of your own places, the ones you liked to be in and the ones that hurt so bad to revisit that you go out of your way to avoid them. In many of her poems, she gives interesting attention to hands; the comfort of a drink held between them, for instance, or of “hands in lovers hands walking” (“For the Days That Are Today”). She describes a grandfather’s hand as “sand returning to sand” (“Hourglass”) and displays the nourishment and violation of hands. Traveling along with her, we come to grips with how we have or haven’t made peace with our own pasts yet – how we have, or haven’t, gotten to this same point of reckoning with the things that tried to break us.
By Sylvia Weiss Sinclair
Vanguard Press, 2022
Paperback: $12.99
Genre: Fiction; Southern Gothic
Review by Brianna Carnley
As a native Alabamian that grew up around the Mobile and Bay Minette area, it was a little surreal to read a story set in my hometown. Sinclair’s language and descriptions accurately capture the area and the people in it, from the warm vignettes of Southern cooking, to “the dirt [roads], tall pines on either side… [made of] soft red clay.” The way the characters discuss and groan about the relatively fast development of the area reminds me of conversations I've heard in my own family (that still occur to this day during Thanksgiving and Christmas) who have lived in the area since the early 1900s. The environment is crafted in such a way that, reading, I feel like I have stepped back into my hometown, though now I live four hours north. It is obvious that Sinclair is a native Alabamian due to the loving gaze through which the readers are given a glimpse of this storied state.
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By Kari Frederickson
The University of Alabama Press, 2022
Hardcover: $39.95; E Book: $39.95
Genre: Southern History
Review 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 of the immense political influence of the Bankhead family, which began after the Civil War and spanned well into the twentieth century.
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By Barry Marks
Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021
Paperback: $15.95
Genre: Poetry
Review 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 us that Asher is Barry Marks’s father, who died in 2017 “after a long, debilitating illness.” Leah is the author’s teenaged daughter, whose life “was ended by a drunk driver in 2007.” Noah, born the year Leah died, is his son. Knowledge of these things is not essential to appreciating the poetry, but it adds depth to understanding the motivation for the plaintive and longing tone.
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By Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Berkley, 2022
Hardcover: $27.00, Kindle Edition: $14.99
Genre: Southern Fiction
Review by Laura Platas-Scott
Dolen Perkins-Valdez’ Take My Hand is a portal to that emotionally charged era with a fresh story based on true events—medical racism and the forced sterilization of poor, young Black girls. The novel opens in 2016 when the protagonist, Civil Townsend, a sixty-seven-year-old doctor in Memphis, decides it’s time to journey to Montgomery, Alabama to visit a family she first met in the early 70s as a nurse for a family planning clinic. But before Civil makes that journey, she wants to tell her daughter Anne the sequence of events that still haunt her. With the car gassed up and packed for the journey, Civil beckons to Anne to join her from her perch on the screened-in porch, inwardly thinking, “I’m not trying to change the past. I’m telling it in order to lay these ghosts to rest.”
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By Randall Horton
Northwestern University Press, 2021
Paperback: $22.95
Genre: Memoir; Essays
Review by James 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.
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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 formidable segregationist and Birmingham’s Public Safety Commissioner during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. He’s the one responsible for the violent assault with firehoses and dogs on peaceful protesters, many of whom were children. His brutality is preserved in the heavy pall he left lingering over Birmingham.
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By D.B. Tipmore; Photographs by Frank Williams
NewSouth Books, 2021
Hardcover: $25.95
Genre: Nonfiction; Memoir
Review by Edward Journey
D.B. Tipmore, an Indiana native whose widely-published journalistic career was launched at New York’s The Village Voice, has lived and traveled around the globe, in far-flung locations including London, Morocco, Paris, Saudi Arabia, South Florida, and Venezuela. He moved to Marion, Alabama, and took an administrative position at Marion Military Institute. While in Marion, he collected the material he includes in My Little Town, a collection of pithy essays focusing on various aspects of life in “Lovelady."
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