Book Reviews | Chapter 16

Fairy-Tale Frolic

Jennifer Trafton debuts with a charming tale for young readers

By Lyda Phillips | January 25, 2011

January 25, 2011 In The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic, Jennifer Trafton creates a delightful fairy-tale world. This beautifully illustrated novel introduces a land inhabited by very serious Leafeaters; overly hilarious Rumblebumps; a spoiled young king who loves pepper and is saved by the love of a cat; Worvil the Worrier, whose imagination paralyzes him; and especially Persimmony Smudge, an irrepressible and courageous heroine. The inhabitants call their home “The Island at the Center of Everything,” but as it turns out, it’s a sleeping giant who’s really at the center of everything. Trafton will read from and sign copies of The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic at Cover To Cover Bookstore in Arlington on Jan. 27 at 5 p.m.

A Disturbing Sweetness

Poet Diann Blakely looks at the work of legendary Memphis photographer William Eggleston

By Diann Blakely | January 20, 2011

January 20, 2011 One of the most striking images in Michael Almereyda’s documentary film, William Eggleston in the Real World, also appears on the cover of the new Eggleston collection, For Now: Eggleston’s wife, Rosa, lies sleeping with a yellow-flowered duvet bunched across her middle, one slender, aristocratic hand holding the sheets in place near the pubic region. Has the couple just had sex? Rosa’s lovely long legs end in feet that appear slightly dirty; the room is small, dingy, and low-ceilinged. The gaping closet door has a pink, pocketed storage container hanging over the top, and a plastic, brown-nippled baby bottle sits on top of a staticky television. Remember when TV used to go “off the air” at night? There’s something yellow and disturbing about the portrait.

Going Native

In a collection of stories, Sybil Baker describes one woman’s search for connection

By Paul V. Griffith | January 18, 2011

January 18, 2011 Talismans is a series of short stories that, not unlike photos in an album, work together to tell a larger tale. Written by Sybil Baker, an English professor at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, these brief snapshots center on Elise, the daughter of a church organist and a Vietnam vet, whose early suburban life is a quagmire of sexual experimentation and social unease. Eventually, Elise drifts to Southeast Asia, where she searches for a connection: to her late father, her lovers, her fellow travelers, and eventually to the local culture and the land itself.

The Truth About the Feechiefolk Freak

Jonathan Rogers’s new YA novel reads like a well-loved folk tale

By Lacey Galbraith | January 11, 2011

January 11, 2011 The protagonist in Jonathan Rogers’s latest young-adult novel, The Charlatan’s Boy, is Grady, a twelve-year-old orphan who doesn’t “have any idea who I was or where I come from.” He doesn’t even have a last name. For much of his life, Grady has traveled from village to village alongside “full-bloomed scoundrel” Floyd Wendellson. Together they put on a circus-freak-show performance, with Floyd as the showman ringmaster and Grady “The Wild Man of the Feechiefen Swamp.” Dressed in “muskrat and possum hides,” his face covered in mud, Grady pretends to be one of the Feechiefolk, a mythical group of people who live in the swampy “black waters of the Feechiefen.”

Crowned with Laurel

Elizabeth Hun Schmidt’s new anthology of work by America’s poets laureate is a treasure

By Fernanda Moore | January 10, 2011

January 10, 2011 As Howard Nemerov once quipped, America’s poet laureate would do well “to devote his tenure to explaining to others what exactly it is that the poet laureate does.” Fortunately for future laureates, The Poets Laureate Anthology, brilliantly edited by Elizabeth Hun Schmidt, clarifies the role of the nation’s poet on retainer and simultaneously provides examples of the best work of poets tapped for the job.

Movies by Design

In a gorgeous new book, Cathy Whitlock takes readers behind the scenes of Hollywood’s most iconic films

By Susannah Felts | January 6, 2011

January 6, 2011 For every Scorsese and Coppola and Spielberg, for every DeMille and Capra and Hitchcock, there’s a little-celebrated figure known as the production designer—the man or woman “behind the curtain,” to borrow a famous phrase from the beloved film The Wizard of Oz. These artists are as pivotal to engineering movie magic as the directors and film actors who have become brands unto themselves, yet their names are rarely known by filmgoers. In a comprehensive new book, Designs on Film: A Century of Hollywood Art Direction, Cathy Whitlock honors their work and details the highlights of their contributions to a century of American moviemaking, from the early silent films right up to the latest blockbusters.

The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History

By Allen Boyer and Mark Nicholls
Routledge
340 pages
$180

The book “explores the reasons why treason coalesced around specific offences agreed by both the monarch and the wider political nation, why it became an essential instrument of enforcement in high politics, and why, over the past three hundred years, it has gradually fallen into disuse while remaining on the statute book.”

~the publisher