Don Noble Reviews

The Rise and Decline of the Redneck Riviera: An...

The Rise and Decline of the Redneck Riviera is the culmination of sixteen years of research drawn from local newspapers, interviews, documentaries, community histories, and several scholarly studies that have addressed parts of this region's history. From his 1950s-built family vacation cottage in Seagrove Beach, Florida, and on frequent trips to the Alabama coast, Jackson witnessed the changes that have come to the area and has recorded them in a personal, in-depth look at the history and...

Noah's Wife: 5500 BCE

ForeWord Magazine's Historical Fiction Book of the Year 2009 is Noah's Wifethe story of Na'amah, a beautiful young girl with Asperger Syndrome who wishes only to be a shepherdess on her beloved hills in ancient Turkey, a desire shattered by the hatred of her powerful brother, the love of two men, and a looming disaster that threatens humanity's survival. Yes, Noah built an ark, but this story has never been told before.

Three Stories from Cairo

Three Stories in Cairo is a book of short stories in English and Arabic. The stories focus on the charm, humor and intrigue in daily life in Egypt.

Rodin's Debutante: A Novel

Lee's life decisionsto become a sculptor, to marry into the haute-intellectual culture of Hyde Parkplay out against the crude glamour of midcentury Chicago. Just's signature skill of conveying emotional heft with few words is put into play as Lee confronts the meaning of his four years at Ogden Hall School under the purview, in the school library, of a bust known as Rodin's Debutante. And, especially, as he meets again a childhood friend, the victim of a brutal sexual assault of which she...

The Authentic Animal: Inside the Odd and Obsessive World...

Madden starts his journey with the life story of Carl Akeley, the father of modern taxidermy. Akeley started small by stuffing a canary, but by the end of his life he had created the astonishing Akeley Hall of African Mammals at The American Museum of Natural History. What Akeley strove for and what fascinates Madden is the attempt by the taxidermist to replicate the authentic animal, looking as though it's still alive. The Authentic Animal is an entertaining and thought-provoking blend of...

Alabama Getaway: The Political Imaginary and the Heart...

From Alabama's largely ineffectual politicians to its miserly support of education, health care, cultural institutions, and social services, Tullos examines why the state appears to be stuck in repetitive loops of uneven development and debilitating habits of judgment. The state remains tied to fundamentalisms of religion, race, gender, winner-take-all economics, and militarism enforced by punitive and defensive responses to criticism. As Alabama competes for cultural tourism and global...

Tin Man

Charlie Lucas is a self-taught artist. Although he has made art since childhood, only since a debilitating accident in 1984 did Lucas turn to art seriously as a form of personal expression. With more than 200 vivid color photographs--of the artist at work, his studio environments, and his finished creations--Tin Man presents Lucas through his own words and stories--his troubled and impoverished childhood, his self-awakening to the depths of his own artistic vision, his perseverance through...

Philip Henry Gosse: Science and Art in 'Letters from...

Philip Henry Gosse's detailed watercolors of Alabama's native insects and plants represent a landmark in the annals of American natural history. Offered for the first time are the complete full-color illustrations from Gosse's Entomologia Alabamensis, along with a biographical essay placing Gosse's work in the context of his long and fruitful life. For the next eight months he collected the insect specimens that he would preserve in the beautifully detailed watercolors of Entomologia...

Iron & Steel: A Guide to Birmingham Area Industrial...

This guidebook of historic iron-production sites is designed to give the reader a factual and illuminating look at the people and events that shaped Birmingham into one of America's leading steel centers. Iron Steel is heavily illustrated with both color and historical black-and-white photographs. It can be used while visiting parks or read as a coherent volume before or after a visit. Featured sites include: Tannehill Ironworks Historical State Park; Shelby Ironworks Park; Billy Gould Coke...

A Senator's Wife Remembers: From the Great Depression to...

The remembrances of Henrietta McCormick Hill, compiled by her daughter Henrietta Hill Hubbard, give insight into the political career of Alabama senator Joseph Lister Hill, and into the courtship, marriage, and later life of the couple. Among topics covered are Senator Hill's work for health legislation, including the Hill-Burton and Hill-Harris Acts, and the couple's reaction to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Told through personal stories and vignettes, A Senator's Wife...

Alabama Afternoons: Profiles and Conversations"

Alabama Afternoons is a collection of portraits of many remarkable Alabamians, famous and obscure, profiled by award-winning journalist and novelist Roy Hoffman. Written as Sunday feature stories for the Mobile Press-Register with additional pieces from the New York Times, Preservation, and Garden Gun, these profiles preserve the individual storiesand the individual voices within the storiesthat help to define one of the most distinctive states in the union. Hoffman's compilation of life...

When Winning Was Everything: Alabama Football Players in...

When Winning Was Everything, a tribute to former Alabama football players who served in the military World War II. They were in leadership positions and in every major battle. Over 50 players are featured with stories and photos of their playing days at Alabama and their military days. "Former Alabama football players were in every major battle of World War II and this book gives us a chance to say 'thank you' to them for their service and introduce them to a new generation of Tide fans",...

Sufficient Grace: A Novel

A spellbinding debut novel, Sufficient Grace explores the power of personal transformation and redemption, and the many ordinary and extraordinary ways they come to pass through faith, love, motherhood, art, even food. Even though we sometimes have to leave behind an old identity in order to discover our soul, this poignant, poetic study of the human condition affirms the enduring importance of relationships and the strength we derive from them.

Georgia Bottoms: A Novel

Georgia Bottoms may be Six Points, Alabama's finest feature - beautiful, worldly, a splendid cook and faithful churchgoer who cares for her aged mother and sells handmade quilts to her grateful neighbors. Georgia also has a discreet side business, "entertaining" six local gentlemen at night. When Preacher Eugene Hendrix (Saturdays) decides he must confess their affair in front of his wife and the entire congregation, Georgia may be able to stop him in time. Written with hilarity, insight,...

A Grown-up Kind of Pretty

A GROWN-UP KIND OF PRETTY is a powerful saga of three generations of women, plagued by hardships and torn by a devastating secret, yet inextricably joined by the bonds of family. Fifteen-year-old Mosey Slocumb-spirited, sassy, and on the cusp of womanhood-is shaken when a small grave is unearthed in the backyard, and determined to figure out why it's there. Liza, her stroke-ravaged mother, is haunted by choices she made as a teenager. But it is Jenny, Mosey's strong and big-hearted...

The Girl in the Blue Beret

Inspired by the wartime experiences of her father-in-law, Bobbie Ann Mason has crafted the haunting and profoundly moving story of an American World War II pilot shot down in Occupied Europe, and his wrenching odyssey of discovery, decades later, as he uncovers the truth about those who helped him escape in 1944. Framed in spellbinding, luminous prose, Marshall's search for her gradually unfolds, becoming a voyage of discovery that reveals truths about himself and the people he knew during...

Come in and Cover Me

When Ren was only twelve years old, she lost her older brother, Scott, to a car crash. Since then, Scott has been a presence in her life, appearing as a snatch of song or a reflection in the moonlight. Now, twenty-five years later, her talent for connecting with the ghosts around her has made her especially sensitive as an archaeologist. More than just understanding the bare outline of how our ancestors lived, Ren is dedicated to re-creating lives and stories, to breathing life into those...

Grace and Grit: My Fight for Equal Pay and Fairness at...

Lilly Ledbetter knew that she was destined for something more, and in 1979, Lilly applied for her dream job at the Goodyear tire factory. Though she faced daily discrimination and sexual harassment, Lilly pressed onward, believing that eventually things would change. In a dramatic moment, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench, urging Lilly to fight back. And fight Lilly did, becoming the namesake of President Barack Obama's first official piece of legislation. Today,...

The Cheshire Cheese Cat: A Dickens of a Tale

Skilley, an alley cat with an embarrassing secret, longs to escape his hard life dodging fishwives brooms and carriage wheels and trade his damp alley for the warmth of the Cheshire Cheese Inn. When he learns that the innkeeper is looking for a new mouser, Skilley comes up with an audacious scheme to install himself in the famous tavern. Once established in the inn, Skilley strikes a bargain with Pip, the intelligent mouse-resident, and his fellow mice. Skilley protects the mice and the mice...

Salvage the Bones: A Novel

As the twelve days that make up the novel's framework yield to their dramatic conclusion, this unforgettable family-motherless children sacrificing for one another as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce-pulls itself up to face another day. A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.

The Odds: A Love Story

Stewart O'Nan's thirteenth novel is another wildly original, bittersweet gem like his celebrated Last Night at the Lobster. Valentine's weekend, Art and Marion Fowler flee their Cleveland suburb for Niagara Falls, desperate to recoup their losses. Jobless, with their home approaching foreclosure and their marriage on the brink of collapse, Art and Marion liquidate their savings account and book a bridal suite at the Falls' ritziest casino for a second honeymoon. While they sightsee like...

Eugene Allen Smith's Alabama: How a Geologist Shaped a...

In 1871 when the University of Alabama reopened after its destruction by Federal troops, Eugene Allen Smith returned to his alma mater as professor of geology and mineralogy. Until his death in 1927, this gifted man devoted his abundant energy and his stout heart to the welfare of the school and the state. Traveling in a mule-drawn wagon, he recorded detailed observations, botanical and geological discoveries, and mineral analyses in his journal. He loaded the wagon with specimens for the...

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's...

"The Warmth of Other Suns" is a detailed study of that enormous migration. Isabel Wilkerson, who is already the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism and the first black to win for individual reporting, has the prize for feature writing as the Chicago Bureau Chief of the "New York Times." This book might very well bring her another Pulitzer, for history. It is that good.

Fascinating Foods from the Deep South: Favorite Recipes...

As Camille Elebash explains in her Foreword, Alline Van Duzor was brought to Tuscaloosa from Atlanta in 1946 to manage the then-new University Club. Van Duzor did just that, for 15 years. In 1962, right after her retirement, she published the original edition of this volume, containing the recipes for the dishes produced in her kitchen.

What They Always Tell Us

"What They Always Tell Us" is a first novel, marketed as a "young adult" book . The story is told in a straightforward, clear and non-experimental way, and it is absolutely about young adults, brothers Alex and James Donaldson. They are students at Central High; their stories are told in alternating chapters.

The Last Queen of the Gypsies

William Cobb has published seven volumes of fiction and has won Alabama's Harper Lee Award for Distinguished Fiction. This novel becomes a dual road trip and picaresque adventure story as we follow the restless Minnie through her years as a prostitute in the old hotel on Cedar Key, to New York and back to Georgia and Florida, not seeking or fleeing, needing only movement, like the gypsy she is. She is not doomed to wander; she is free to wander.

Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

Rice is factual, but somewhat remote and, to no one's surprise, maintains mostly a tone one might call cool. Anyone searching for details of Dr. Rice's personal life will be mostly disappointed. This is absolutely not a tell-all autobiography. A few men get a few words each.

Time: A Novel

It is unlikely that Roger Reid will soon quit his day job. Along with Doug Philips and Wendy Reed, he recently shared a regional Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Writing for the "Alabama in Space" episode of the very successful, long-running series "Discovering Alabama."

Don't Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day...

The premise of each of these essays is the same: describe what job you were working at when you decided to try your hand at earning a living writing. Sonny Brewer has somehow convinced 23 hard-working, busy, professional writers to pause and remember when they weren't writing full time, but earning a living at some job, dirty or clean, poorly paid or lucrative, dangerous or only mortally boring, that they quit in order to devote themselves to their craft.

Rickwood Field: A Century in America's Oldest Ballpark

Allen Barra, a Birmingham native and the author of books on his kinsman Yogi Berra and "The Last Coach," Paul "Bear" Bryant, begins his book just where he should: at the scene of the inspiration for the creation of Rickwood Field.

"Billion-Dollar Kiss"and "Fireworks Over Toccoa: A Novel"

"Billion-Dollar Kiss" gives a long, knowledgeable insider's look into the lunatic bin known as the Writers Room, glimpsed in "30 Rock," and the process and huge pressures of a weekly show. The dialogue in "Fireworks over Toccoa" is unimpeachable and each scene is drawn as camera-ready for the folks at Hallmark or Lifetime as a seasoned television professional can make it.

Adam & Eve: A Novel

Naslund has tended to be over the years a kind of historical novelist. Although the novel is not science fiction, exactly, in order to have a chance, it needs to be read in a flexible, imaginative way.

The Grace of Silence: A Memoir by Michele Norris

The name Michele Norris will of course be familiar to NPR listeners. Often teamed with Steve Inskeep, Norris is a well-known NPR reporter. Usually these radio personalities are just voices to us, without even faces to go with them, never mind life stories, but Norris has written what is, more or less, a memoir.

The Typist by Michael Knight

Michael Knight of Mobile, Alabama is putting together a remarkably successful career, almost a model. He began with a volume of stories, Dogfight and Other Stories, and a novel, Divining Rod, both in 1998. There was then a second volume of stories, Goodnight, Nobody, in 2003 and a pair of novellas, The Holiday Season, in 2007. It is widely understood that the lead story in Goodnight, Nobody, entitled "Birdland," is being made into a feature film with Robert Duvall. Here's hoping.

Leaving Gee's Bend by Irene Latham

It occurred to me as I was reading through Leaving Gee's Bend that in all the young adult books I have read in the last couple of years,...the authors have been men and their protagonists boys.

Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger: New and Selected...

When I first held this volume I was disappointed to see it contained only seven new stories with another seven "selected" from previously published works. Like Smith fans everywhere I already own Cakewalk, Me and My Baby View the Eclipse and News of the Spirit. But disappointment soon turned to gratitude as I reread Smith's story of heartbreak and healing, "Bob, a Dog" and then to the delight of reunion with one of my favorite short stories of all time, "Intensive Care."

The Simian Transcript by David Kopaska-Merkel

In 2008 in this space I commented on Kopaska-Merkel's first collection, Nursery Rhyme Noir. That volume was a retelling, in the form of hard-boiled detective fiction, of the murky, mysterious stories of Humpty Dumpty, Jack and Jill, Little Bo Peep and others. Those short- shorts were odd, but the volume was held together by the Mother Goose nursery rhymes.

Wings of Opportunity: The Wright Brothers in Montgomery,...

Julie Williams, who holds a doctorate in mass communications from the University of Alabama and teaches journalism at Samford University, has written a tidy, entertaining account of the first school established in America to teach civilian pilots. More specifically, the idea was to teach individuals to teach others to be pilots. There were five students.

Old Mobile Restaurants by Malcolm Steiner

Malcolm Steiner is a lifetime Mobilian and food enthusiast. This volume, oversized and on glossy paper, is a kind of personal scrapbook with brief text, sometimes little more than cut lines. This is not a formal history.

The Victory Album: Reflections on the Good Life after...

Philip Beidler had built up a considerable reputation as a critic in the fields of Alabama literature and the literature of the Vietnam experience before he began writing extensively out of his own Vietnam experience in Late Thoughts on an Old War (2004) and American Wars, American Peace (2007).

The Governor of Goat Hill by Eddie Curran

Curran felt it was time to transform his dozens of newspaper pieces and years of interviews and research into one, comprehensive book.

Anthill: A Novel by E.O. Wilson

Several Alabamians have won the Pulitzer Prize, but only one, E.O. Wilson, has won it twice, so when the state's most honored writer decides to publish a novel, at age 80, attention must be paid.

"The Big Steal" by Emyl Jenkins

Emyl Jenkins of Virginia and North Carolina had achieved, by the 1980's, a national reputation as an expert in antiques. She has been the author of two syndicated antiques columns, "Antique Wise" and "Ask an Appraiser" and is the author of "Emyl Jenkins' Appraisal Book: Identifying, Understanding and Valuing Your Treasures" (1989).

"Broken Wing" by Thomas Lakeman

Within a few pages, though, the reader realizes everybody's personal life is to go on hold as Yeager is recruited to go undercover to New Orleans, to rescue a young woman kept hostage and break up a particularly vicious organized crime ring. He will go as a "broken wing," an agent disgraced and drummed out of the Bureau and, now "rogue," willing to join the bad guys and seek revenge for his terrible disgrace.

"Masques for the Fields of Time" by Joe Taylor

Joe Taylor, Professor of English at the University of West Alabama, is the author of a novel, "Oldcat and Ms. Puss: A Book of Days for You and Me," and two volumes of stories, "The World's Thinnest Fat Man" and "Some Heroes, Some Heroines, Some Others."

"Dixie Noir" by Kirk Curnutt

Curnutt is a good-natured man but not a comic writer. I had hoped, and for a few pages felt, that "Dixie Noir" was something lighter. It seemed at first as if Curnutt were having some fun with noir, that this novel might be a send-up of the noir genre, something like what Garrison Keeler does in Guy Noir, Private Eye, but this turned out definitely not to be the case.

"Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard's Fight for Civil Rights...

Some mark the start of the modern Civil Rights Movement with the Montgomery bus boycott. Some, closer to correct, mark it at the murder of Emmett Till. But no mass movement starts big, all of a sudden.

"Mighty by Sacrifice: The Destruction of an American...

WWII veterans are passing on now at a rapid rate and the generation that came home and resumed civilian life and said so little about their experiences will soon be silent forever. Their stories, like the ones the Noleses have captured in this book, must not be lost.

"The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in...

This is a story told calmly, without bitterness or self-aggrandizement. I admired Zellner's candor about his adversaries, without a smarmy mellowness. He has, as a Christian, mostly forgiven, but he has not forgotten.

On Harper's Trail: Roland McMillan Harper, Pioneering...

He was an odd duck all right, but this book, with its many, many lists of the specimens, including their Latin names, Harper saw on his many, many outings, will be of interest mainly to botanists.

"Fanning the Spark: A Memoir," by Mary Ward Brown

Brown's many devoted fans will take in this book avidly, wanting to know every detail of her life, even though it is a life spent mainly rooted in middle Alabama, on a farm, without global travel except for one trip to Russia, or politics or scandal, or rich, famous, important friends and acquaintances.

The Adventures of Douglas Bragg: A Novel, by Madison...

Jones' hero is young Douglas Bragg, who is 24 years old, has graduated from college, lives in Birmingham, Alabama in 1960 and has itchy feet. He will go out to see the world, heading north, hitchhiking.

Wishbones, by Carolyn Haines

Wishbones is the eighth in Carolyn Haines' "Bones" series, and is a little different from its predecessors. The series' premises were set out in Them Bones. Sarah Booth Delaney returns to her home, Dahlia House, in Zinnia, Mississippi, Sunflower County, because the family place is threatened with foreclosure. Sarah Booth's parents died in a crash when she was twelve and she has been in NYC in a not very successful attempt to establish a career as an actress. Back in Zinnia she runs into a...

The Millionaires: A Novel of the New South, by Inman...

Majors has published The Millionaires, set in Knoxville in the 1970s, and it is a marvel. The Millionaires, with its wry, sophisticated narrative voice, a voice in full control, is the best, most fully accomplished new novel I have read in perhaps three years.

Nursery Rhyme Noir: The Hasp Deadbolt Files, by David C....

Nursery Rhyme Noir is not quite flash fiction but it is only one notch upthe short-short. Kopaska-Merkel has created a P.I., Hasp Deadbolt, often mistakenly called Deadbeat, to tell these stories. Read aloud, or even silently, Deadbolt sounds like Garrison Keillor's Guy Noir...

Jim Crow and Me: Stories from My Life as a Civil Rights...

Solomon Seay did not wish to write an autobiography or a memoir and he has not. This volume is, as the subtitle indicates, a collection of anecdotes, mainly stories from his decades as a civil rights attorney in Alabama, mainly from 1957 to 1977. In a way, this format is more effective than a regular biography, because the day-to-day life of almost anyone is not that interesting. Seay's book is, then, a series of dramatic scenes, which are, I think, what we remember most from histories and...

Letter From Point Clear

Ellen Owen and her brother Morris were raised on Mobile Bay, on the promenade, just a few houses down the boardwalk from the Grand Hotel. When they were teenagers, their affluent family sent them north to New England, to school, and that was that.

Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover's Companion to...

Organized state by state, this is a guide to the finest . . . what shall we call it? Down home cooking? Country cooking? Soul food? Traditional southern fare? This is a guide to BBQ, fried chicken, fried catfish, sausages, oysters raw and cooked, crawfish, hushpuppies, Brunswick stew, smoked mullet, collard greens and pot likker, and a dozen different kinds of biscuits, cornbread, and rolls.

A Centennial Celebration of the Bright Star Restaurant

Greeks are famous for choosing self-employment over working for others. That is a commonplace. There's more money and freedom in owning your own business, however humble, and being the boss. In any case, these Greeks took a look at the coal mines, where miners were killed in ceiling collapses and explosions, and at the foundries, where workers slaved away in the summer near furnaces in unimaginable heat, and "discovered they were better suited for the restaurant and food service industries."

Chemistry

In these stories, the mountain folk have to deal with divorce, the breakup of families, and, in general, the steady erosion of a way of life that was hard but had a wholeness to it. Ron Rash is capturing this moment of transformation and making it into art.

Prophet from Plains: Jimmy Carter and His Legacy

The joke among pundits is he used the presidency "as a stepping stone to greatness." Gaillard reevaluates both the Carter presidency and the years since, neither canonizing nor castigating.

Willie Mays: Art In The Outfield

As Willie Mays's seventy-fifth birthday approached on May 6, 2006, friends thought they wanted to do something more, something different for him than just birthday cake and testimonials.

Guests Behind the Barbed Wire: German POWs in America

Now, Ruth Beaumont Cook has done a splendid job of investigating the story of the POW camp in Aliceville, AL, interviewing those who are still alive and getting down the historical record. Her book is thoroughly researched and intelligently written and ensures that the camp will not be forgotten.

From the Farm House to the State House: The Life and...

From the Farm House to the State House is the first of two books by Fuller Kimbrell about his life from birth to around 1970, in which he has been at the center of an enormous amount of Alabama history and politics in his long life.

The Bear Bryant Funeral Train

This volume, and its accompanying critical material, might serve as a basis for some fruitful discussion about what is happening in new fiction in America.

Penumbra

Haines the novelist has a penchant for the dark and violent, and she has taken time off from the Bones books to indulge this urge; Penumbra is indeed dark, violent, disturbing, nearly melodramatic.

. . . and the angels sang

This is a first-person narrative, told by Jon Simmons Bernier, a native of Alabama. Jon Bernier is a man of sixty, which seems young enough, but he has been through a lot.

Longleaf by Roger Reid

Midnight Red

When I picked up this novel, the first thing I saw was a bit of copy on the back cover: quot;In the summer of 2000, the Buckhead Vampire was at large.quot;

Fishing for Gold: The Story of Alabama's Catfish Industry

While fish had been raised for food for centuries in some cultures, it wasn't until recently that farmers in Alabama started raising catfish. Most of those people are, happily, still alive, and Karni Perez, an independent researcher in Auburn, has found them and talked to them.

Tubby Meets Katrina

Tony Dunbar has written several books on the South?about Mississippi, migrant workers, and Southern political radicals?and has won the Lillian Smith Award, given to a book which promotes racial understanding and harmony.

Exile

In this novel, Exile, Patterson truly becomes a writer of international thrillers. The fictional Prime Minister of Israel, Amos Ben-Aron, is touring the United States to promote a peace plan which will be equitable to Palestinians and Israelis both.

The World Made Straight

Ron Rash is an accomplished poet, and his descriptions of the mountains, the laurel, the creeks and trout, the sky and atmosphere of the Smokies are beautiful, but these people are held in place not by the beauty of the land, but by the magnetic pull of their ancestors' bones and blood.

Smonk

Smonk reminds one of Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy, in which there seems to be a homicide on every page. The strongest element of Tom Franklin's new novel, Smonk, is character. You have absolutely never seen people like this before.

A Mansion's Memories

Mary Mathews, wife of University of Alabama president David Mathews, lived in the mansion for eleven years, 1969-1980, and did her research and sought out the stories of the previous presidents and their families. Those stories are collected in this book.