Don Noble's Book Reviews

“The Ex-suicide: A Mountain Brook Novel”

Author: Katherine Clark   

Publisher: University of South Carolina Press, Story River Books

Pages: 240

Price: $27.99 (Hardcover)

“The Ex-suicide” is the fourth and final novel in Katherine Clark’s Mountain Brook series, books which were among the first in the late Pat Conroy’s imprint Story River Books.

“Grief Cottage”

Author: Gail Godwin  

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Pages: 336

Price: $20.00 (Hardcover)

Because Gail Godwin lived for a good while in Asheville, North Carolina and has lived in Woodstock, New York since 1976, it is easy to forget she is an Alabama woman, raised in Birmingham.

Godwin had huge early successes with the novels “A Southern Family” and” A Mother and Two Daughters” which has sold over a million and a half copies.

“Extraordinary Adventures”

Author: Daniel Wallace   

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

Pages: 328

Price: $25.99 (Hardcover)

Daniel Wallace’s new novel opens with a scene familiar to all. Edsel Bronfman is at home when the phone rings. Poor, naïve Edsel—and who would name a child Edsel, the most sensational failure in American automotive history?—answers, fearing it is bad news. Perhaps his mother is ill or he is being fired from his job. Edsel is not an optimistic fellow.

“The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time”

Author: Brooke Gladstone  

Publisher: Workman Publishing

$8.95 (Paperback)

Pages: 92

Brooke Gladstone, as National Public Radio listeners know, is the co-host, with Bob Garfield, of “On the Media.”

On that show, the hosts give some news, but more often, talk with journalists and others who discuss how the news is gathered, sorted, delivered. What methods are changing? Is the media doing its best? What aspects of media need improving? What sources are trustworthy?

“Small Great Things”

Author: Jodi Picoult   

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Pages: 464

Price: $28.99 (Hardcover)

This is the third of the three finalists for the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction, given to a novel which “features the role of lawyers in society and their power to effect change.” Read all three and cast your vote at abajournal.com by June 30.

Jodi Picoult is a terrifically successful author of popular novels, many of which have been best sellers, the most popular of which may be “Leaving Time.”

“Last Days of Night”

Author: Graham Moore    

Publisher: Random House

Pages: 357

Price: $28.00 (Hardcover)

Last week I reviewed “Gone Again,” the first of the three finalists for the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. This is the second; next week I will talk about the third.

Anyone interested may read all three novels and cast a vote for the winner at www.abajournal.com. The deadline is June 30th.

“Gone Again: A Jack Swyteck Novel”

Author: James Grippando     

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 400

Price: $26.99 (Hardcover)

Each year the UA School of Law and the ABA Journal sponsor the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction, given to a book which “features the role of lawyers in society and their power to effect change.” This year’s finalists have been announced and I thought it might be fun to review the three novels. You too may want to read them and then vote for a winner at abajournal.gov. Voting closes June 30.

“Once in a Blue Moon”  

Author: Vicki Covington    

Publisher: John F. Blair

Pages: 201

Price: $26.95 (Hardcover)

“Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway’s Secret Adventures, 1935-1961”

Author: Nicholas Reynolds   

Publisher: William Morrow

Pages: 267

Price: $27.99 (Hardcover)

In the beginning, everybody loved Ernest Hemingway and Hemingway’s fiction. He had best-selling novels and was one of the most recognized people in the country, imitated in his personal habits and his prose style. And he won the Nobel Prize for literature.

“Echolocation: A Novel”

Author: Mark Powell   

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 336

Price: $24.99 (Hardcover)

Southern fiction is continually evolving, the characters and settings changing with the times. What began with raw East Alabama frontier characters in “The Adventures of Simon Suggs,” then “Huckleberry Finn,” then Erskine Caldwell’s pellagra-ridden creatures on” Tobacco Road,” moved to Faulkner’s plantations, Welty’s and Thomas Wolfe’s small cities.

Walker Percy set a lot of his fiction at the country club.

“Sticks and Bones: A Sarah Booth Delaney Mystery”

Author: Carolyn Haines   

Publisher: Minotaur Books

Pages: 354

Price: $25.99 (Hardcover)

Here it is, the seventeenth Sarah Booth Delaney mystery. Like most of the previous, the story is set in the Mississippi Delta. Sarah Booth lives in Dahlia House, in Zinnia, Mississippi, in Sunflower County. This novel is longer than most Bones books, but the plot is engaging and Haines’s fans won’t mind.

“High Notes: Selected Writings”

Author: Gay Talese, with an Introduction by Lee Gutkind   

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Pages: 288

Price: $20.00 (Trade paperback)

Lee Gutkind, the founder and editor of the magazine “Creative Nonfiction,” is arguably the guru of this subgenre.

“The Weight of This World”

Author: David Joy   

Publisher: G. P. Putnam’s Sons

Pages: 260

Price: $27.00 (Hardcover)

David Joy dreamed he would be able to make a living writing about fly fishing in the cold, clear waters of the Blue Ridge. It is his passion. In fact, he began his writing career with a memoir structured around fly fishing, “Growing Gills: A Fly Fisherman’s Journey” (2011).

“Setting Free the Kites”

Author: Alex George  

Pages: 336

Price: $27.00 (Hardcover)

Lawyers who write fiction are not rare. Alex George, however, is a slightly different breed. George, an Englishman, studied law at Oxford, practiced for some eight years in London and Paris, writing all the while, and then in 2003 emigrated to the United States, to Missouri, where he continued lawyering and writing. His first American novel was, not surprisingly, a novel of migration.

“Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel”

Author: George Saunders  

Publisher: Random House

Pages: 342

Price: $28.00 (Hardcover)

George Saunders is recognized as the most important short story writer working today. He even received a Macarthur Genius Grant and a Guggenheim in the same year. The 2013 collection “Tenth of December” was a finalist for the National Book Award.

“The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature”

Author: J. Drew Lanham  

Publisher: Milkweed Editions

Pages: 224

Price: $24.00 (Hardcover)

Although I had never thought about it, J. Drew Lanham, now a professor at Clemson, reminds readers several times during his memoir that there are precious few black ornithologists, in fact not very many black naturalists/biologists of any kind.

“Tuscaloosa Boneyard: An Addie Bramson Mystery”

Author: Carolyn Breckinridge   

Publisher: Author House

Pages: 456

Price: $22.95 (Paper)

Carolyn Ezell, writing as Carolyn Breckinridge, introduced her Tuscaloosa detective Addie Bramson in “Tuscaloosa Moon: A Murder Mystery,” 2013.

Now Bramson is back in “Tuscaloosa Boneyard.”

This title, “Boneyard,” suggests more death and mayhem than the novel actually involves.

“Perfect Little World: A Novel”

Author: Kevin Wilson   

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 334

Price: $26.99 (Hardcover)

A few weeks ago I praised Kevin Wilson’s short story collection “Tunneling to the Center of Earth” and his novel “The Family Fang” for their cleverness and inventiveness. Wilson has a great comic gift.

Now Wilson’s second novel, “Perfect Little World,” has been released. I confess I was, at first, disappointed that it was not primarily funny, but then I settled into enjoying a provocative and very thoughtful book.

“Beautiful War: Studies in a Dreadful Fascination”

Author: Philip D. Beidler                                                                                     

Pages: 173

Price: $34.95 (Hardcover)

Although Beidler’s last book, “The Island Called Paradise,” is a collection of essays about Cuba, America’s wars have been his main concern from the beginning of his career. Beidler devoted an entire book to discussions of Vietnam War literature, and several collections discuss World War II, “The Good War,” and its cultural aftermath.

“Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories”

Author: Kevin Wilson  

Publisher: Ecco, HarperCollins

Pages: 205

Price: $13.99 (Paper)

“The Family Fang: A Novel”

Author: Kevin Wilson

Publisher: Ecco, HarperCollins

Pages: 309

$23.00 (Hardcover)

In just a few days, Kevin Wilson, who teaches writing at the University of the South in Sewanee, will publish his third book, the novel “Perfect Little World.” To prepare for reviewing it, I thought to read his book of stories and previous novel.

“Alabama: The Making of an American State”

Author: Edwin C. Bridges  

Publisher: The University of Alabama Press

Pages: 241 pp.

Price: $39.95 (Cloth); $19.95 (Paper)

For thirty years as the Director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, Ed Bridges was immersed in Alabama history. Now Director Emeritus, Bridges has finished his magnum opus, a narrative history of the state from 11,000 B.C. to the very present, in time for the Alabama Bicentennial in 2019.

“Avid Reader: A Life”

Author: Robert Gottlieb   

Publisher: Farrrar, Strauss and Giroux

Pages: 323

Price: $28.00 (Hardcover)

Robert Gottlieb is 85 years old and arguably the most important editor in America since Maxwell Perkins was editing Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Wolfe in the 20s and 30s. He should have written his memoirs long ago, but there was always the next book to seek, to sign, to edit, the next issue of the magazine to put out, and in the last 20 years or so, the next book to write, about subjects Gottlieb felt passionately about.

“Mr. X and Mr. Y”

Author: Donald Brown  

Publisher: Borgo Publishing

Pages: 122

Price: $20.00 (Paper)

In June of 1959 Donald Brown, 23 years old, recently graduated from Birmingham Southern College, was a cub reporter for the “Birmingham News.” When a report came in that two armless, legless torsos had been found in two different counties in northeast Alabama, the city editor sent Brown to cover the story.

The two torsos will be, for a time, known as Mr. X. and Mr. Y.

“Greetings from Alabama: A Pictorial History in Vintage Postcards”

Author: Wade Hall with Nancy B. DuPree and Christopher Sawula

Publisher: NewSouth Books

Pages: 224

Price: $24.95 (Trade Paper)

“Homegoing”

Author: Yaa Gyasi  

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf,

Pages: 300

Price: $ 26.95 (Hardcover)

The author of this debut novel is Yaa Gyasi— pronounced “Jessie.”

Born in Ghana, Gyasi was brought by her parents to the United States at the age of two. After stops in Ohio, Illinois, and Tennessee, they settled in Huntsville, Alabama when she was ten, her father becoming a teacher of French at UAH. Gyasi is, then, an African immigrant, not an African-American, a difference which is brought out in the novel.

“The Whole Town’s Talking”

Author: Fannie Flagg  

Publisher: Random House

New York

2016

Pages: 402

Price: $28.00 (Hardcover)

Fannie Flagg’s novels are usually somewhat sweet, and, as they say, heart-warming stories of ordinary people going about their lives in small town America. One does not find or expect overt violence or sexuality. The novels are hugely successful and, even if most people don’t realize it, the road to mass popularity and wealth in America is “Everybody Loves Raymond,” not Lennie Bruce or Chris Rock talking blue.

“El Paso: A Novel”

Author: Winston Groom  

Publisher: Liveright: a Division of W. W. Norton

New York

2016

Price: $27.95 (Hardcover)

Pages: 477

After publishing 7 novels, including the mega-hit “Forrest Gump” in 1986, Groom left off writing novels and turned to nonfiction. He has published 10 works of history, mainly on military subjects, from the Civil War battles of Shiloh and Vicksburg to WWI fighting in Flanders to the darkest period of WWII, the year 1942.

“H is for Hawk”

Author: Helen Macdonald 

Publisher: Grove Press

Pages: 283

Price: $16.00 (Paperback)

“H is for Hawk” has come to my attention because it has already won prizes in Britain and was a “New York Times” bestseller in spite of being nearly unclassifiable by genre.

“Freedom of the Mask”

By Robert McCammon           

Subterranean Press

Burton, MI

2016

$ 26.95 (Deluxe hardcover Edition)

530 pp.

After a series of highly successful novels in the horror genre, Robert McCammon switched to a series of historical murder mysteries, set in the years around 1700.

In the first Matthew Corbett novel, “Speaks the Nightbird,” Corbett, a magistrate’s assistant, investigates charges of witchcraft in Fount Royal, South Carolina.

“Perfume River: A Novel”

Author: Robert Olen Butler   

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press

Pages: 273

Price: $25.00 (Hardcover)

“Perfume River” is, pardon the pun, a confluence of several themes that Robert Olen Butler, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for “A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain,” has explored in previous works and is as smart and eloquent as anything he’s done before.