Don Noble's Book Reviews

This is not a day-to-day memoir or a volume of military overview or strategy. Philip Beidler has written a series of essays on discrete topics. Each essay is a piece of the puzzle he is putting together for us. The result is a picture of his war.

By Don Noble

"The Life of Pushmataha" is a fascinating little piece of biography and legend. This man arrived as a teen among the Choctaw, claiming to have had no parents and no particular place of origin.

By Don Noble

Let me at the outset assure the reader that I have very little knowledge of Southeastern Native Americans, that I had never heard of either Pushmataha, the Choctaw chief, or Gideon Lincecum before reading this little book.

This book of essays is not a debate. Published in the midst of the campaign season, it is a call to arms by a group of writers who believe the Bush presidency to be the worst and the most dangerous, ever.

By Don Noble

Tuscaloosa, AL – Where We Stand will inevitably be compared and contrasted with the 1930 collection of essays I?ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, by Twelve Southerners.

Sarah Booth Delaney, an orphan, in her thirties, after an unsuccessful attempt to establish an acting career in New York City, has returned to the family home, Dahlia House, in Zinnia, Sunflower County, in the Mississippi Delta.

By Don Noble

Hallowed Bones

Them Bones, Buried Bones, Splintered Bones, Crossed Bones, and now Hallowed Bones?Carolyn Haines? fifth Sarah Booth Delaney mystery novel and her best yet.

It is not unusual for many fiction writers to set their first novels on campus or at least in the town of their artistic birth. Valerie Vogrin, has set her first novel, Shebang, on what I take to be 13th Street of Tuscaloosa, right up from Abernathy's Market.

By Don Noble

Shebang

i>Inside Alabama is "a commentary, an extended essay on events and attitudes that I think made and make Alabama what it is today."

By Don Noble

Inside Alabama

In A Sunday in May, Perry has produced a "prequel" to Stigmata. This novel takes place again in Johnson Creek, Alabama, south of Union Springs, and chronicles the lives of the Mobley family from 1915 until 1963.

By Don Noble

A Sunday In June

Atkins has just published his fourth Nick Travers suspense/mystery novel. The heart of any such series is the sleuth, of course, and Nick, established in the first novel, Crossroad Blues, is quite a creation.

By Don Noble

Dirty South

Here's the first thing you need to know about Ace Atkins: Ace is his real name. It is on his birth certificate.

Loretta Cobb of Montevallo has watched her husband, Bill, write fiction for the last thirty years, so it's no surprise that after her retirement as Director of the Writing Center there, she took up short story writing herself. Her first collection, The Ocean Was Salt, has now been published, and the ten stories are varied and pleasing.

By Don Noble

The Ocean Was Salt

Slow Way Home is rough. It sometimes appears to be a less than final draft of a novel, especially in the final third. Perhaps there was pressure on Morris to publish while there was still word of mouth about A Place Called Wiregrass.

By Don Noble

Slow Way Home

Forty years and six volumes of fiction after living through the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham, AL, Naslund had achieved huge success with the novel Ahab's Wife, and has done in fiction what Diane McWhorter has done in prose: told her version of the story of that time and place.

Four Spirits

Randall Williams has entitled the book Weren't No Good Times, but readers will be startled by the mellow nature of many of the answers. The book is founded on the oral history project of the Great Depression days when writers interviewed former slaves about their recollections of the Civil War and slavery.

By Don Noble

Weren't No Good Times

In the year 2000 Jack Riggs was chosen in Nashville as one of the South's "Emerging New Voices," and now When the Finch Rises has been blurbed by Lee Smith, Jill McCorkle, Silas House, Fred Chappell, Lewis Nordan, and Clyde Edgerton. In a kind of imprimatur, Edgerton says, "Riggs's up-and-coming days are over. He's here." Well, I don't think so. Not yet.

By Don Noble

When the Finch Rises

Dennis Covington of Birmingham showed in 1995 that he belongs on the top shelf of writers of creative nonfiction with the publication of Salvation on Sand Mountain. Covington's readers have been looking forward to Redneck Riviera for almost nine years now, and, sad to say, they will be disappointed.

By Don Noble

Redneck Riviera

Willem is conscious of what he is doing and how he appears to others, but he can't stop himself. First he loses control of his utterances, much like a Tourette's Syndrome victim. He begins to babble, then rage, to yell at the top of his lungs.

By Don Noble

At the age of fourteen, in 1954, Greenhaw, and his protagonist alter-ego Thomas Morgan Reed, developed scoliosis, a severe curvature of the spine. In The Spider's Web Thomas must endure a year of excruciating operations and body casts.

By Don Noble

The Spider's Web

...her right arm was shattered. Her spine was fractured in two places, her right foot was crushed, and her left leg broken in two places. In addition, she was sexually assaulted.

By Don Noble

"We need a worldwide movement that will work to make churches and nursing homes interchangeable."

By Don Noble

Lunch at the Piccadilly

Clyde Edgerton is without doubt one of the funniest authors working today. But, in his sixth novel, Lunch at the Piccadilly, he has chosen as his subject the nursing home: old, ill, crippled, even dying people. Is this funny? Can it be made funny? Yes, it can, and at the same time a thoughtful and respectful tone is maintained.

Do not think you can give this novel to your old aunt for Christmas, but it may be, if you are made of sturdy stuff, you can read it yourself.

By Don Noble

In a Temple of Trees

German submarines sank over 400 merchant vessels and some warships before the United States got convoys organized and protected and began to bring to bear the technologies of radar, sonar, air patrols, coastal blackouts, and all the rest.

By Don Noble

The Keeper's Son

In "A Roadside Resurrection," by Larry Brown, the first piece in Sonny Brewer's second volume of Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe, one might wish the idiot in question had been locked up by the state, but he hasn't. He's in the basement.

By Don Noble

Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe, Vol. II

Carolyn Haines, who has for the last few years been writing the delightful "Bones" mystery series, set in Mississippi, has here written her first nonfiction book. My Mother's Witness: The Peggy Morgan Story is a kind of dual biography of both Peggy Morgan and her mother, Inez.

By Don Noble

My Mother's Witness