Arts & Life

Neil White had it made. A good-looking fellow, the son and grandson of lawyers, White had graduated from Ole Miss after four years as a self-satisfied Kappa Sigma, married a beautiful girl, Linda, and was the father of two adorable children, Neil and Maggie. The family lived in Oxford, Mississippi, where Neil was the founding publisher of the "other" newspaper, the "Oxford Times."

By Don Noble

Within a few pages, though, the reader realizes everybody's personal life is to go on hold as Yeager is recruited to go undercover to New Orleans, to rescue a young woman kept hostage and break up a particularly vicious organized crime ring. He will go as a "broken wing," an agent disgraced and drummed out of the Bureau and, now "rogue," willing to join the bad guys and seek revenge for his terrible disgrace.

By Don Noble

This book comes heavily blurbed, including one by a psychiatrist, and the blurbs all say essentially the same thing: "In and Out of Madness" is powerful, raw, brutal and honest. I guess it is all those things. It was not for me, however, a satisfying piece of fiction.

By Don Noble

Joe Taylor, Professor of English at the University of West Alabama, is the author of a novel, "Oldcat and Ms. Puss: A Book of Days for You and Me," and two volumes of stories, "The World's Thinnest Fat Man" and "Some Heroes, Some Heroines, Some Others."

By Don Noble

Joe Taylor, Professor of English at the University of West Alabama, is the author of a novel, "Oldcat and Ms. Puss: A Book of Days for You and Me," and two volumes of stories, "The World's Thinnest Fat Man" and "Some Heroes, Some Heroines, Some Others."

As the Alabama football team moves to the end of a so-far undefeated season and hopes are very high for a national championship, this seems like a perfectly reasonable time to take a look at "Twelve and Counting."

By Don Noble

As the Alabama football team moves to the end of a so-far undefeated season and hopes are very high for a national championship, this seems like a perfectly reasonable time to take a look at "Twelve and Counting."

A.M. Garner, who has been teaching for some time in Florence, at the University of North Alabama, and before that at Virginia Commonwealth University, holds the MFA degree in fiction writing from The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

By Don Noble

Curnutt is a good-natured man but not a comic writer. I had hoped, and for a few pages felt, that "Dixie Noir" was something lighter. It seemed at first as if Curnutt were having some fun with noir, that this novel might be a send-up of the noir genre, something like what Garrison Keeler does in Guy Noir, Private Eye, but this turned out definitely not to be the case.

By Don Noble

Many of these stories are sad stories. The reader is more likely to weep than smile, but they will affect you.

By Don Noble

Some mark the start of the modern Civil Rights Movement with the Montgomery bus boycott. Some, closer to correct, mark it at the murder of Emmett Till. But no mass movement starts big, all of a sudden.

By Don Noble

Alf Van Hoose is a name surely well known to many Alabama newspaper readers. Van Hoose worked at the "Birmingham News" for 43 years.

By Don Noble

In Alabama, Greek Revival may have flourished best in Mobile, but when planters from the Black Belt came to town to meet with their cotton factors and to shop, they liked what they saw and sometimes had their country rural places built in this style.

By Don Noble

WWII veterans are passing on now at a rapid rate and the generation that came home and resumed civilian life and said so little about their experiences will soon be silent forever. Their stories, like the ones the Noleses have captured in this book, must not be lost.

By Don Noble

Although the five illustrated newspapers from which the engravings in Alabama Illustrated were taken were all published elsewhere, two in New York, two in Boston and one in London, the readers of these papers had a strong curiosity about life in the American South.

By Don Noble

This is a story told calmly, without bitterness or self-aggrandizement. I admired Zellner's candor about his adversaries, without a smarmy mellowness. He has, as a Christian, mostly forgiven, but he has not forgotten.

By Don Noble

This clever tale ranges widely, making references not only to Buddhism, the Talmud and Christian foot-washing, but also Cesar Milan, the dog whisperer, and new age ideas such as "wherever you are that is where you are supposed to be."

By Don Noble