Don Noble's Book Reviews

  “Lion Plays Rough: A Leo Maxwell Mystery”
Author: Lachlan Smith
Publisher: The Mysterious Press: An Imprint of Grove/Atlantic
Pages: 246
Price: $24.00 (Cloth)

Just last year, 2013, Lachlan Smith, a Birmingham attorney practicing civil rights and employment law, published his debut thriller, “Bear Is Broken.” Smith was well prepared to write that novel, having studied writing at Stanford and Cornell and then getting a law degree from UC Berkeley in 2009.

  “Brother Sid: A Novel of Sidney Lanier”
Author: May Lamar
Publisher: The Donnell Group
Pages: 265
Price: $22.95 (Cloth)

  “Second Cup of Coffee: Collected Columns”
By Mary Adams Belk
Introduction by Joe McAdory
2014
Auburn, Alabama
Solomon & George Publishers
$18.00 (Paper)
209 pp.

Mary Belk has written a weekly column for the “Opelika-Auburn News” for many years and of course her readers have urged her to collect these columns and make them available as a single volume.

“The Secret of Magic”
Author: Deborah Johnson
Publisher: P.G. Putnam’s Sons
Pages: 394
Price: $26.95 (Cloth)

“The Invitation” Author: Clifton Taulbert
Publisher: NewSouth Books
Pages: 206
Price: $25.95 (Cloth)

“The Shoe Burnin’: Stories of Southern Soul”
Editor: Joe Formichella
Publisher: River’s Edge Media
Pages: 216
Price: $34.95 (Cloth) including CD

“The Shoe Burnin’: Stories of Southern Soul.” The title has a story behind it and the subtitle is a pun.

The story is simple. On a winter’s night, near Brewton, Alabama, a group of kindred spirits were talking, singing, drinking of course, and rather than making a trip to the woodpile, they burned, one at a time, a box of old shoes.

“The Never List: A Novel” Author: Koethi Zan
Publisher: Viking Press
Pages: 303
Price: $27.95 (Cloth)

One rarely begins a review by quoting from the acknowledgements, but this is an unusual situation. Koethi Zan thanks a number of people including her daughters, who “are not allowed to read one word of [“The Never List”] until college.”

This is perfectly understandable.

“Hum” Author: Michelle Richmond
Publisher: University of Alabama Press, FC2
Pages: 149
Price: $16.95 (Paper)

A native of Mobile, Michelle Richmond began her career with a volume of stories, “The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress,” which won the Associated Writing Programs prize for short fiction in 2000.

“Fielder’s Choice” Author: J. Mark Hart
Publisher: TradeWorks Publishing
Pages: 460
Price: $12.95

“Superzelda: The Graphic Life of Zelda Fitzgerald”
Author: Tizania Lo Porto
Illustrator: Daniele Marotta
Publisher: One Peace Books
Pages: 175
Price: $16.95 (Paper)

Graphic books are, to me, a relatively new phenomenon. I have seen a few graphic novels and Lila Quintero Weaver’s fine graphic memoir, “Darkroom,” but this is my first graphic biography. As successful as many graphic novels may be, perhaps graphic books are not suited to biography. In biography we usually already know what the characters look like. Sometimes the faces are downright famous.

“Turning the Tide: The University of Alabama in the 1960s”
Author: Earl H. Tilford
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Pages: 252
Price: $34.95 (Cloth)

Earl Tilford offers what seems a very useful way to think of the history of the University of Alabama. He suggests there have been three UAs, or rather the university has been born, then faded and reborn twice. The first university dates from the founding in 1831 and ends when the Union troops burned all but four buildings in 1865.

“Bear Is Broken: A Leo Maxwell Mystery”
Author: Lachlan Smith
Publisher: The Mysterious Press: An imprint of Grove/Atlantic
Pages: 256
Price: $24.00 (Cloth)

Since the early years of John Grisham, It has become a commonplace that attorneys write legal thrillers. Nothing new there. But few can have been as fully prepared for the job as Lachlan Smith.

Smith took a BA and MA at Stanford, where he was a Richard Scowcroft Fellow in the prestigious Wallace Stegner Writing Program, and followed these up with an MFA in fiction writing from Cornell.

text  “March with Me”
Author: Rosalie T. Turner
Publisher: Cypress Creek Publishing
Pages: 210
Price: $18.00

In her Foreword to “March With Me,” Rosalie Turner says a major motivation for writing this short novel was “the fact that most people in our country today have either forgotten or never knew about the Children’s March” in Birmingham in April of 1963.

“Eugene Bullard: World’s First Black Fighter Pilot”
Author: Larry Greenly
Publisher: NewSouth Books
Pages: 160
Price: $19.95 (Cloth)

“Someone Else’s Love Story”
Author: Joshilyn Jackson
Publisher: William Morrow
Pages: 300
Price: $26.99 (Cloth)

Joshilyn Jackson has achieved the status of best-selling author with a solid reader/fan base. One can tell that from the dust jacket: her name is in larger, brighter type than the words of the title.