Don Noble reviews books from this year’s Festival
Don Noble is Alabama's best known and most trusted voice on literature, and he has been a friend and adviser to the Festival since its beginning. He taught American literature at the University of Alabama for 32 years and is now Professor of English, Emeritus. He has been the host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show Bookmark since 1988 and has broadcast a weekly book review for Alabama Public Radio since November of 2001, with about 850 reviews so far. Noble is the editor of four anthologies of Alabama fiction and the winner of the Alabama state prizes for literary scholarship, service to the humanities and the Governor's Arts Award.
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Cassandra King: Tell Me a Story, My Life with Pat Conroy
"Cassandra Conroy has given us Tell Me a Story, and it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that this book was written in tears and blood.
She has fought through her own fresh grief over the death of Conroy in 2016, and painted a painfully honest and intimate portrait of her husband.
Cassandra perhaps set out to write a book about Pat, and about their marriage of 18 years, but she finally has written her own autobiography as well, and has been as honest about herself as about Pat."
Read Don’s full review here.
Angela Jackson Brown: Untethered
"Angela Jackson-Brown’s new novel is set in Troy, Alabama in November and December 1967, during the Johnson administration and at the height of the Vietnam War. “Untethered” is a scrupulously realistic novel, and might be called a quiet novel, or a slow novel with little action on stage, but I think it would be more accurate to call it a novel of tension, anxiety, stress, and worry."
Read Don’s full review here.
John Sledge: Mobile and Havana – Sisters Across the Gulf
"Sledge reminds the reader of the strong connections during the age of exploration and the ways in which both cities shifted from one foreign flag to another: French, Spanish, American. In the nineteenth century the voyage between the two cities took under three days and trade was brisk. Mobile imported coffee, cigars, fruit. And Havana unloaded from Mobile, sawn lumber, wood for barrels and even firewood, the Cubans having cut down their forests. The Cubans, slaveholders themselves, were sympathetic to the Confederate cause. (Clearly, if it were not for current political difficulties, extensive trade would spring up again at once.) Boys from Havana attended Spring Hill College and returned to teach Cubans baseball which, obviously, really caught on."
Read Don’s full review here.
Dan T. Carter: Unmasking the Klansman: The Double Life of Asa and Forrest Carter
"Asa Carter was, nevertheless, a very bright fellow, an avid reader, and an articulate and persuasive talker, even something of an actor. He had some success as a radio DJ, announcer, and then right-wing commentator. The apex of his career of course was as a speechwriter for George Wallace, supplying his first inaugural speech with the line 'Segregation today…segregation tomorrow…segregation forever.'
Dismissed from Wallace’s service, Carter, a skilled writer, then made a most remarkable turn. He lost weight, got a deep tan, and reinvented himself as Forrest Carter, claiming to be half Cherokee, raised in east Tennessee. As Forrest, he wrote several books including The Outlaw Josey Wales, made into a very successful movie starring Clint Eastwood, a fictional biography of Geronimo and, most astonishingly, The Education of Little Tree, a fraudulent Indian memoir and bestseller."
Read Don's full review here.
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Tim Lockette: Atty at Law and Atty in Love
"I do not read many YA novels but for Atty Peale, an exception must be made. Atty has a sincere, intelligent, honest voice that commands attention.
"In the first book, Atty represents a condemned dog and saves his life. In the second she discovers the truth about a murder for which the wrong man was arrested. The human case may be the exception. Atty is at heart an animal rights activist. When this novel opens, she is presenting to the Strudwick County Commission a plan to phase out animal euthanasia at the shelter."
Read Don’s full review here.