Don Noble's Book Reviews

Title:  The Meaning of Human Existence"
Author:  E.O. Wilson

Transcript and audio to be added soon.

Title:  Flying Shoes
Author:  Lisa Howorth

Text and transcript to be added soon.

Title:  The Men We Reaped
Author:   Jesmyn Ward

Transcript and audio to be added soon.

Title:  Dear Committee Members
Author: Julie Schumacher

Transcript to be added soon.

 Title:  Prosperity
Author:  B. J. Leggett

Transcript and audio to be added soon.

Title:  All The Way To Memphis and Other Stories

Author:  Suzanne Hudson

Transcript and audio to be added soon.

Title:  “Southern Living Bourbon & Bacon: The Ultimate Guide to the South’s Favorite Food Groups”
Author: Morgan Murphy
Publisher: Oxmoor House
Pages: 288
Price: $22.95 (Hardcover)

“The All-Girl Filling Station’s Last Reunion”
Author: Fannie Flagg
Publisher: Random House
Pages: 367
Price: $15.00 (paper)

“The All Girls Filling Station’s Last Reunion” is Fannie Flagg’s ninth novel and her fans are going to love it.

Descriptions of this novel by reviewers and by Flagg’s friends Mark Childress, Pat Conroy and Carol Burnett include: funny, quirky, charming, kind, entertaining, page-turner, sunny, witty, warm-hearted and of course, heartwarming. And it’s true.

“The Resurrectionist”
Author: Matthew Guinn
Pages: 284
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co.
Price: $25.95 (Cloth)

To begin at the beginning: a resurrectionist is a body snatcher, a person who digs up newly buried bodies in a graveyard and delivers them to a medical school for students to work on and learn from in anatomy class.

“An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Art of H. L. Mencken”
Author: Hal Crowther
Publisher: The University of Iowa Press; Muse Books: The Iowa Series in Creativity and Writing
Pages: 92
Price: $16.00 (Paper)

The Iowa Muse Series is not full-fledged biography or literary criticism. These short books are actually extended essays that attempt to explain the very essence of the writer under consideration. Previous subjects have been as varied as Wordsworth, Blake, Keats and the James brothers, William and Henry.

“The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son”
Author: Pat Conroy
Publisher: Random House
Pages: 336
Price: $28.95 (Cloth)

This is not exactly an autobiography, although Conroy’s life story gets told. But then, as his prologue says: “I’ve been writing the story of my own life for over forty years....My stormy autobiography has been my theme, my dilemma, my obsession….”

“The Jumper: A Novel”
Author: Tim Parrish
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Pages: 287
Price: $26.95 (Paper)

Raised in blue-collar Baton Rouge, after LSU and an MFA in fiction writing at Alabama, Tim Parrish has had his teaching career at Southern Connecticut State University. But in his writing, Parrish has never left the neighborhood in Baton Rouge where he was raised.

Through three books in three genres he has returned to this seething, rather toxic place.

“Thelonious Rising”
Author: Judith Richards
Publisher: River’s Edge Media
Pages: 317
Price: $19.00 (Paper)

Judith Richards of Fairhope, Alabama, is a veteran novelist with a considerable track record. Since her first novel, “The Sounds of Silence,” in 1977 she has published five more, to considerable acclaim.

“13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey” (Commemorative Edition)
Author: Kathryn Tucker Windham and Margaret Gillis Figh, with a new Afterword by Dilsy Windham Hilley and Ben Windham
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Pages: 124
Price: $29.95 (Hardcover)

“Halley”
Author: Faye Gibbons
Publisher: NewSouth Books
Pages: 208
Price: $21.95 (Hardcover)
208

Faye Gibbons is an old pro at children’s and Young Adult writing. An Auburn graduate and author of more than a dozen books, she won the Georgia Author of the Year award in 1983 for “Some Glad Morning” and the Alabama Author Award for “Night in the Barn” in 1998, given by the Alabama Library Association.