Book Reviews | Chapter 16

A Disturbing Sweetness

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

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

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

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

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.

A Hero's Secret

By Ralph Bowden

January 5, 2011

January 5, 2011 When Bobby Hoppe pulled the trigger, was it a premeditated act of murder or a split-second reaction in self defense? In 1957, nobody knew but Bobby Hoppe himself, and nobody else really wanted to know: Bobby was a Chattanooga football hero. In 1988, new evidence and an aggressive new investigator reopened the cold case. A Matter of Conscience is Sherry Lee Hoppe’s memoir about her husband’s long-hidden anguish—and about the trauma of exposure.