Don Noble's Book Reviews

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

The prolific Frank Turner Hollon has just published his third novel. At first, A Thin Difference seems like many another crime novel you have read.

By Don Noble

A Thin Difference

Goodnight, Nobody follows the novel Divining Rod and the story collection Dogfight and Other Stories. Knight, originally from Mobile and now at the University of Tennessee, is building himself an impressive career.

By Don Noble

Goodnight, Nobody

Harris recounts the day in the third grade when a group of white dentists came to her elementary school and provided free services. They took no pay, but neither did they drill and save teeth: they only pulled decaying teeth.

By Don Noble