Don Noble's Book Reviews

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“Opening the Doors: The Desegregation of the University of Alabama and the Fight for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa”
Author: B.J. Hollars
Publisher: The University of Alabama Press
Pages: 288
Price: $29.95 (Cloth)

Alabama Governor George Wallace’s infamous stand in the schoolhouse door took place on June 11, 1963, at Foster Auditorium, nearly fifty years ago.

“The Kings and Queens of Roam”
Author: Daniel Wallace
Publisher: Touchstone Books
Pages: 288
Price: $24.00 (Hardcover)

Here in his fifth novel Daniel Wallace has returned to many of the concerns and techniques of “Big Fish,” his first and most widely admired novel.

“He Needed Killing: Book 1 in the Needed Killing Series”

Author: Bill Fitts

Publisher: Borgo Publishing Editions; Electronic Publisher: Smashwords

Pages: 220

Price: $10.95 (Paper)

In September of 2011 Bill Fitts retired from his job as a computer scientist at the University of Alabama and almost at once began his “He Needed Killing” mystery series.

“Southern Bound: A Gulf Coast Journalist on Books, Writers, and Literary Pilgrimages of the Heart”

Author: John S. Sledge

Publisher: The University of South Carolina Press

Pages: 280 $24.95 (Paper)

From 1995 until just last fall, 2012, John Sledge was the editor of the “Mobile Press-Register” Books Page.

“Life After Life: A Novel”
Author: Jill McCorkle
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Pages: 352
Price: $24.95 (Cloth)

Jill McCorkle entered the publishing scene with a great splash. In 1984 Algonquin published her first two novels “July 7th” and “The Cheerleader” simultaneously. It was hoped this would create “buzz” and it did. Since then there have been four story collections and three more novels, but it has been 17 years since the last novel so “Life After Life” is long awaited by her fans.

“Why We Are Here: Mobile and the Spirit of a Southern City”
Authors: Edward O. Wilson and Alex Harris
Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation (W. W. Norton & Company)
Pages: 228
Price: $39.95

“Crossing on the Paris: A Novel”
Author: Dana Gynther Publisher: Gallery Books, Simon & Schuster
Pages: 314
Price: $15.00 (Paper)

The date is June 15, 1921, Le Havre, France. Three women who have never met are captured by the ship’s photographer as they mount the gangplank for the maiden voyage of the French luxury liner “Paris.”

The “Ship of Fools” motif in fiction, most famously exploited in the novel by Katherine Anne Porter, is time honored and very useful.

“Wash”: A Novel

By Margaret Wrinkle

Atlantic Monthly Press

New York

2013

$25.00 (Cloth)

408 pp.

Make no mistake, “Wash” is a big, ambitious, demanding, novel, long but never plodding. Margaret Wrinkle, a Birmingham native, has done a prodigious amount of research and then put it in the service of a vivid imagination and a lyrical prose style.

“Wash” is a most impressive debut performance.

“In Love with Defeat: The Making of a Southern Liberal”

Author: H. Brandt Ayers

Publisher: NewSouth Books

Pages: 336

Price: $29.95 (Cloth)

H. Brandt Ayers, Brandy to his friends, has been publisher of the family-owned “Anniston Star” since returning home from Washington D.C. and taking over from his father, Col. Harry Ayers, in 1963. Now 78 years old, Ayers has published his memoirs.

“In Love with Defeat” runs along two parallel tracks.

“The Book of Neil”
Author: Frank Turner Hollon
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Pages: 223
Price: $20.00 (Cloth)

Prolific Baldwin county attorney/novelist Frank Turner Hollon has, this time out, written a fable. It is a familiar story, one that has been exploited in fiction and films, serious and satirical.

“The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks”

Author: Jeanne Theoharis

Publisher: Beacon Press

Pages: 304

Price: $27.95 (Cloth)

The author of this new biography of Rosa Parks begins by addressing an obvious concern: don’t we already know, if not all there is to know, then at least all we need to know, about the life of Rosa Parks?

Her answer is a convincing no.

First, the two biographical accounts that have been done are incomplete for different reasons.

“Eden Rise: A Novel”

Author: Robert J. Norrell

Publisher: NewSouth Books

Pages: 288 pp.

Price: $27.95 (Cloth)

Robert J. “Jeff” Norrell is already well known to students of Southern Studies. Norrell, who taught at UA and is now professor of history at the University of Tennessee, has won acclaim with books on Booker T. Washington, the civil rights movement in Tuskegee, several volumes on the history of the state of Alabama, race relations in America in the twentieth century and half a dozen others.

  “Larry Brown: A Writer’s Life”

Author: Jean W. Cash

Publisher: University of Mississippi Press

Pages: 400

Price: $35.00 (Cloth)

Late in the evening of November 23, 2004, the Mississippi writer Larry Brown said to his wife, Mary Annie, what were just about his last words. “I’m ready to go to bed….Life’s good now, ain’t it?”

Brown died of a heart attack the next morning.

The Cruise of the Rolling Junk
Author:  F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The Cruise of the Rolling Junk”

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Introduction by Julian Evans

Foreword by Paul Theroux

Publisher: Hesperus Press Limited

Pages: 92

Price: $11.95 (paper)