Beyond Buffalo by Betsy Reeder takes readers beyond the deaths and physical destruction caused by the Buffalo Creek disaster to explore the long-term psychological impacts on survivors. The Buffalo Creek flood occurred in Logan County, West Virginia, on February 26, 1972, when three coal slurry impoundment dams fail during heavy rainfall, killing 125 and injuring 1,121. Over 4,000 were left homeless. But […]
“Talmadge Farm” by Leo Daughtry
February 28, 2025 by Leave a Comment
In a sweeping story set in eastern North Carolina, Leo Daughtry takes readers from 1957 to 1970, a time of convulsive societal change in Talmadge Farm (Story Merchant 2024). As the Vietnam War intensifies, the civil rights movement spreads across the South, reaching even wealthy bank president and tobacco farmer, Gordon Talmadge. North Carolina’s Research […]
“Rowdy Boundaries” by James L. Robinson
February 28, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Every lawyer has stories to tell—alarming, hilarious, intriguing, or just plain peculiar tales of people and events that require legal intervention in one way or another. James L. Robertson has collected a variety of Mississippi’s most notable accounts of law-breaking characters and balanced them out with a few outlandish but little-known episodes. Robertson is well-positioned […]
“The Delta in the Rearview Mirror: The Life and Death of Mississippi’s First Winery” by Di Rushing
February 23, 2025 by 1 Comment
Di Rushing’s The Delta in the Rearview Mirror: The Life and Death of Mississippi’s First Winery (UMiss Press 2024) is described as both memoir and true crime. If one reads the book for memoir alone, the description of the author’s Mississippi upbringing, her travels abroad as a young military wife in Germany, and the return […]
Read of the Month: “Prodigal” by Phyllis Gobbell
February 4, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Fireworks, fireflies, and gunfire light up Phyllis Gobbell’s exquisite, poignant novel Prodigal (Histria Fiction 2024). This modern retelling of the prodigal son is, above all, a story of love and forgiveness in a Southern family. A Baptist preacher’s son, nineteen-year-old Connor Burdette flees from his hometown of Montpier, Tennessee, after a boy he is with […]
Books of Note: “Can’t Shake the Dust”; “Faulkner, Welty, Wright”; and “Before We Left the Land”
February 3, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Can’t Shake the Dust Can’t Shake the Dust (Regal House Publishing 2024) by C.H. Hooks employs three points of view to paint a full picture of a dysfunctional family in South Georgia. The alcoholic father and son are obsessed with racing—even though the father lost a leg in a racetrack accident. The recovering addict mother […]