Book Reviews

A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope, Possibility, and Innocence Lost  By Frye Gaillard University of Georgia (NewSouth Books Imprint), 2023 Hardback: $35.00; Paperback: $29.95 Genre: American History Reviewed by Edward Journey I was seven years old in 1962 when the Cuban Missile Crisis happened. I did not quite understand what was going on, but I was aware of the somber tones of the newscasters, the hushed tones of the grown-ups, and the tension around me. In [...]

AWF is pleased to post Books in Brief, a compendium of titles recently received in the office. Full-length reviews will often be forthcoming, but we hope BIB provides a quick peek at new works in time for your next bookstore or library visit. So many good things to share!

Ghosts Over the Boiler: Voices from Alabama's Death Row by Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty Edited by Katie Owens-Murphy Vanderbilt University Press, 2023 Paperback, $24.95; Web PDF, $19.95 Reviewed by Holly Genovese   On January 25, 2024, Kenneth Smith was the first person to be executed via nitrogen hypoxia in the United States. Though his art and writing were not featured in the anthology, Kenny Smith (as he was known to his friends) is mentioned repeatedly in Ghosts Over the Boiler: Voices [...]

Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood: Stories By Bradley Sides Montag Press, Feb. 2024 Paper: $14.95; eBook: $2.99 Genre: Short Fiction Reviewed by Edward Journey Something is always falling from the sky in Bradley Sides’s audacious collection of short stories, Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood. Stars fall, ashes fall, snow falls, kites fall, robotic body parts fall, while gases sometimes leak into closed spaces. People disappear, or transform, and mythically proportioned monsters become proxies for those who are lost, abandoned [...]

Coming Home: A Roadmap from Fearful to Fully Alive By Layla Palmer Bethany House Publishers, 2023 Trade cloth: $29.99 Genre: Christian Living/Personal Growth Reviewed by Lisa Harrison If your New Year’s resolutions include embracing a cozier lifestyle, you will enjoy Coming Home: A Roadmap from Fearful to Fully Alive by popular decorating and lifestyle blogger Layla Palmer. Part scrapbook, part journal, part commonplace book, Coming Home is a compendium of self-care practices rooted in the author’s Alabama upbringing with its focus [...]

Odyssey of a Wandering Mind: The Strange Tale of Sara Mayfield, Author By Jennifer Horne The University of Alabama Press; 2024 Hardcover: $120.00; Paperback and eBook: $34.95 Genre: Biography, History Reviewed by Edward Journey Sara Mayfield (1905-1979), an Alabama writer, journalist, and inventor, grew up in a privileged Southern family, forged a career in writing and reporting, and spent seventeen years in a state mental institution. After being released from the mental hospital, at age sixty, she hit the ground running [...]

Circulation By Ken Autrey Dos Madres Press, 2023 Paperback: $21.00 Genre: Poetry Reviewed by Edward Journey In his poem “Mnemonist,” Ken Autrey evokes a man “whose mind / will not forget,” even as the words of the very poem he is writing “now flatten into precision, / holding me in relentless thrall.” That poem seems to be a fitting guidepost for Autrey’s new collection, Circulation, and its poems of memory, loss, and discovery. In a poem like “Expedition,” Autrey’s description of [...]

AWF is pleased to post Books in Brief, a compendium of titles recently received in the office. Full-length reviews will often be forthcoming, but we hope BIB provides a quick peek at new works in time for your next bookstore or library visit. So many good things to share! Bringing Home the White House: The Hidden History of Women Who Shaped the Presidency in the Twentieth Century By Melissa Estes Blair University of Georgia Press; 2023 In Bringing Home the White [...]

William Wright, Series Editor Taylor Byas, J. Bruce Fuller, and Adam Vines, Volume Editors TRP: The University Press of Sam Houston State University; 2023 Paperback: $29.95 Genre: Poetry Review by Ken Autrey  The recently published tenth volume of The Southern Poetry Anthology features poets of Alabama. This ambitious series began back in 2005 when Stephen Gardner and William Wright agreed to embark on a project to edit collections of poetry from each southern state. The initial volume appeared in 2007 and [...]

By Anne WhitehouseDos Madres Press: 2023Paper: $22Reviewed by Nancy Owen NelsonAnne Whitehouse’s collection Steady is difficult to pigeonhole, given the variety of content in the volume. While the poems are largely narrative in method, Whitehouse taps into the lives and minds of historical figures such as Dante (“Dante’s Tombs”) and more recent 20th-century figures such as the poets Auden (“Auden’s Bookcase”) and Mark Strand (“At the Poet’s Last Reading”). However, the most compelling poems in the volume appear in Section III, [...]

By Kim Cross Grand Central Press, 2023 Hardcover: $32.00; Kindle: $16.99; Audio CD: $31.85 Genre: Nonfiction/True Crime Reviewed by Danny Gamble For true-crime literature enthusiasts, Kim Cross has served up a doozy in her latest book, In Light of All Darkness: Inside the Polly Klaas Kidnapping and the Search for America’s Child. With an eye toward microscopic detail, Cross engrosses her readers in the sad tale of the Northern California girl who disappeared one fateful night in October 1993. Cross’ story [...]

By Theodore Haddin Madville Publishing; January 16, 2024 Paperback: $18.95; eBook: $8.49 Genre: Poetry Reviewed by Edward Journey For the young boy in “First Moves,” the first poem in The Pendulum Moves Off: poems, a new collection by Theodore Haddin, “It’s always a time / coming; he doesn’t yet think of / how it will be passing.” The progression of time in these poems sneaks up on the reader. Time – both human-made and natural – is an essential component of [...]

By Angela Jackson-Brown Harper Muse, 2023 Paper, $17.99 Fiction Reviewed by Cheryl Carpenter In the first chapter of Travels with Charley: In Search of America, John Steinbeck reminds those readers who would follow him and his dog on the journey that they didn’t “invent” sin; sin is old. He goes on to compare a journey to a marriage and notes that “the certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” Awareness of such observations would have done little [...]

By Hardy Jackson Alabama Rural Electric Association, 2023 Paper, $21.95 Reviewed by Bill Plott There was a time when local columnists were fixtures at Alabama’s weekly newspapers. One of the best was Earl Tucker, editor of The Thomasville Times and father of the beloved Katherine Tucker Windham. Skillet Bird filled that slot on The Shelby County Reporter for many years. Shrinking print media, even in local weeklies, has likely taken a toll on that tradition. However, a version of it survived [...]

Starlight and Other Stories By Edward M. George TNSB, 2023 Paperback: $19.95 Genre: Fiction, Short Stories Reviewed by Edward Journey In the new collection, Starlight and Other Stories, by Edward M. George, many of the characters are older, sometimes retired or in late second careers, and living normal lives that will be familiar to most readers. Some are wealthy, some not so much. There are Viet Nam vets, old hippies, retired professors, several attorneys, private investigators, and an occasional musician. In [...]

The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year By Margaret Renkl Spiegel and Grau, 2023 Hardcover: $32.00 Genre: Nature, Memoir, Essays Reviewed by Edward Journey In 1998, when I took a job in Jackson, Mississippi, I moved into an apartment in a suburban neighborhood in north Jackson. When I told a new co-worker where I lived, she scowled – “Oh, you live around the corner from that awful house where they don’t keep their yard up. It’s overgrown and full of recycled [...]

A Glooming Peace This Morning By Allen Mendenhall Livingston Press: 2023 Paper, $18.95 Reviewed by Lynn Lamere Allen Mendenhall’s A Glooming Peace This Morning is a well-written coming-of-age story that gives glimpses of a small town’s moral code in the seventies. Mendenhall’s phrasing cadence lulls the reader into anticipating an innocent recounting of childhood events. However, within the story’s foreshadowing and telling title, the reader knows something sinister is lurking. Set in the fictional town of Andalusia in Magnolia County, the [...]

Shooting at Heaven’s Gate By Kaye Park Hinckley Chrism Press, 2022 Paper: $16.24 Genre: Fiction Reviewed by Lisa Harrison Shooting at Heaven’s Gate, the latest novel from award-winning author Kaye Park Hinckley, explores questions of moral culpability, divine agency, and the nature of good and evil in a taut, intricately woven tale of vengeance, synchronicity, and redemption. Parallel narratives follow the stories of combative university professors and the residents of a poultry farm nearby. Narcissistic psychology professor Malcom J. Hawkins plots [...]

End Times By John M. Williams Sartoris Literary Group, Inc., September 2023 Hardcover: $40.00; Paperback: $24.95; eBook: $9.95 Genre: Fiction Reviewed by Jon Soko John Williams has certainly kept busy since retiring in 2015 from LaGrange College where he was a noted professor and advocate for a generation of students, writers, and educators. In addition to currently serving as a well-respected mentor and all-around literary guru at Reinhardt University’s Creative Writing MFA program, much of his attention over the past several [...]

Dual: PoemsBy Matthew MinicucciAcre Books, 2023Paperback, $17.00Genre: PoetryReviewed by Edward Journey Many ideas are at play in Matthew Minicucci’s Dual, a poetry collection that examines masculinity, aggression, and violence while incorporating the semi-obsolete grammatical conceit of the “dual” – “the not singular and not plural of things.” Dual is the fourth collection of Minicucci’s poetry. The award-winning author, who is widely published in journals, is currently an assistant professor in the Blount Scholars Program at the University of Alabama. With [...]

Kiss Me in the Coral Lounge: Intimate Confessions from a Happy Marriage By Helen Ellis Doubleday, 2023 Hardcover, $18.79 Genre: Humor Reviewed by Lynn Lamere Kiss Me in the Coral Lounge: Intimate Confessions from a Happy Marriage by Helen Ellis is, put simply, one laugh after another. A chuckle is inevitable while reading her essays in one sitting or enjoying one at a time. Ellis’ musings are a tribute to her husband and their twenty-plus years together, sharing intimacies such as [...]

Handbook of Alabama’s Prehistoric Indians and Artifacts By David M. Johnson, Jr. With contributions by Steven Meredith, Ashley Dumas, and Ben Hoksbergen Borgo Publishing, Tuscaloosa, AL, 2019 (second edition) Paper, $42.95 Genre: Nonfiction Reviewed by Bill Plott One hardly knows how to begin a review when a book has such a comprehensive treatment of its subject. This extraordinary work is not only a handbook for professional and amateur archaeologists, but also a primer, an introduction to Alabama’s rich Native American prehistory [...]

Alabama: Poems By Rodney Jones LSU Press, 2023 Paperback, $18.95 92 pages Reviewed by  Katharine Armbrester Reprinted from Southern Review of Books by permission. In Alabama: Poems, Rodney Jones can render his home state with an insight so sharp that it bites and stings. The collection gathers his poems, prose, and aphorisms, and Jones is dedicated to both lyricism and cold reality: he examines Alabama with a mournful but unflinching eye for detail. Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet whose debut collection, [...]

Shot Through Time By Richard Modlin Hartside Publishing, 2023 $24.99, Hardcover; $15.99, Paper Genre: Fiction Reviewed by Danny Gamble In Shot Through Time, Richard Modlin offers a tale that is at once science fiction novel, historical novel, and romance novel. He tells his tale with a deft eye toward detail. Indeed, Modlin breathes life into his primary characters: Sgt. Noland Black, a thirty-year-old grenadier in the 10th British Regiment; Dr. Andrew Gorsky, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Revolutionary War [...]