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Biography

Review

Review by bookpagedev

It is unfortunate that James R. Mellow passed away just as his biography of Walker Evans was near completion, because he will miss the joy readers will most certainly feel at its publication. (The final pages are by Hilton Kramer.) Mellow paints his portrait of Walker Evans with details gathered from a variety of primary sources, including interviews, diaries, letters, contact sheets, notes, reviews, and work logs. Through his account of Walker Evans as one of the most significant photographers of the 20th century, Mellow also has created a cultural history of an American era.

Walker Evans’s most famous photographs are probably those taken in 1935 and 1936, which begin with his work for the Resettlement Administration and continue through his project photographing tenant farmers in the South. Although these photographs provide incredible documents of Depression Era America, Evans bristled at the tendency of critics to call his work documentary. In fact, what makes Evans’s photographs extraordinary is that they transcend any particular time and place, revealing fundamental truths of human existence.

Mellow provides an unusual glimpse into an artistic elite in New York from the ’20s to the ’50s through Evans’s collaboration and correspondence with friends, including Lincoln Kirstein and James Agee. From his encounters with Hemingway to his lunches with Whittaker Chambers, Evans’s life manages to connect culturally significant figures from World War I to the Cold War.

Mellow discovers that Evans remained somewhat enigmatic, even to those close to him. As a result, the most intimate and revealing moments in the book are the letters exchanged between Evans and his first wife, Jane. These letters expose Evans as warm and loving, whimsical and humorous. The photographs included in Mellow’s book also enhance the portrait of Evans. In addition to some of Evans’s most famous photographs, some less celebrated photographs (the blind accordion player on the subway and portraits of Jane, for instance) make an appearance and are absolutely mesmerizing.

It’s a testament to James Mellow that at the end of the biography, the reader feels as though she has traveled and worked with Walker Evans. Mellow’s Walker Evans is a welcome refreshment in today’s desert of tell-all biographies. The biographer definitely will be missed.

Phoebe Lichty is a writer and photographer in New York City.

It is unfortunate that James R. Mellow passed away just as his biography of Walker Evans was near completion, because he will miss the joy readers will most certainly feel at its publication. (The final pages are by Hilton Kramer.) Mellow paints his portrait of…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Stone Quarry by S. J. Rozan extends an award-winning series with plot and personal repercussions from last year’s A Bitter Feast. Bill Smith and Linda Chin are attempting to mend their relationship by keeping a therapeutic distance she in the City, Bill at his upstate New York escape cabin. Even with classical music in the air, the boonies are not peaceful. Smith and Chin’s resolutions of past situations have led to a grim expansion of problems. A body in the basement of Smith’s favorite hangout and a woman requesting his expertise in tracking stolen art without police involvement force Smith to break his own policy of not working while on vacation. Rozan’s seamless writing ranges from glorious to no-frills, the action is backwoods tough, and Stone Quarry is consistently believable.

Tom Corcoran is the Florida-based author of The Mango Opera and the new Florida Keys mystery, Gumbo Limbo, both from St. Martin’s.

Stone Quarry by S. J. Rozan extends an award-winning series with plot and personal repercussions from last year's A Bitter Feast. Bill Smith and Linda Chin are attempting to mend their relationship by keeping a therapeutic distance she in the City, Bill at his upstate…

FictionWomen's Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

In her new novel Half a Heart, Rosellen Brown uses the experiences of one woman to examine the dual themes of motherhood and race. Brown, noted author of Before and After and Civil Wars allows the reader a deep look at the interior terrain of Miriam Vener, a beleaguered woman confronting the responsibilities of parenting and the challenges of racial prejudice.

A former civil rights activist, Miriam has seen her life change in many ways some subtle, some obvious. When she was a young woman involved in the intense Mississippi civil rights campaigns of the 1960s, Miriam possessed a liberal, humanist outlook that opened her to a forbidden affair with a black professor at a local college. That controversial liaison produced a daughter who is relinquished to her father after a heated child custody dispute.

Now 18 years later, Miriam is married to a wealthy ophthalmologist in the upper-middle-class suburbs of Houston, with children and an aging mother preoccupied with death. The staid, comfortable life of affluence has sparked feelings of ambivalence and tension, fostering her desire to reconnect with the daughter she gave up years before. The novel soars as Miriam seeks out her African-American daughter, Veronica, who is a troubling mix of sensitivity, intelligence, conflicting emotions, and racial pride. Brown pulls no punches in her insights into the character of these two women separated by both race and class. Veronica wants to make her mother pay dearly for her long absence from her life, and some of the book’s most potent scenes occur when the pair clash in their emotional tug of war.

Through her reunion with her daughter, Miriam gets to reassess her roles as mother, wife, and former activist, as well as examine the themes of identity, intimacy, and femininity. While Brown’s astute observations about the value of wealth and influence are noteworthy, her views on love and race are especially fascinating. Describing the courtship between Eljay and Miriam during the perilous times of the civil rights movement, she writes: She was amazed at what she saw: that, no part of them forbidden, they were beautiful together, they were remaking the whole ugly world, and yes, he was right, she had not failed to notice their differences. It would be easy to be overwhelmed by the novel’s complex themes and its many heart-wrenching scenes and miss the book’s low-key humanity and gentle honesty.

The resolution of the novel’s overlapping conflicts is handled with delicacy, care, and precision. This is the power and grace of Brown’s most introspective, accomplished work to date.

In her new novel Half a Heart, Rosellen Brown uses the experiences of one woman to examine the dual themes of motherhood and race. Brown, noted author of Before and After and Civil Wars allows the reader a deep look at the interior terrain of…

Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Laurie Fox has managed to turn what could have been a harrowing and depressing autobiographical novel into a moving and funny story. Her style is brisk and readable. The bare facts are these: Lorna Person is born in 1952 to a suburban Los Angeles family. Her father works for TV, her mom is a housewife, and her sister, two years older, is mentally ill. Everyone does the best they can but there isn’t much left over emotionally for Lorna. Lonnie, the older sister, can’t be neatly diagnosed. She is masculine, violent, obsessed with the macabre. She is the creature from the black lagoon utterly miscast as a member of a sunny suburban family. Lonnie is sent from one special school to another but always comes back home again, wearing the family out with her rages and accusations.

Lorna excels at sweet and Lonnie excels at tough, says their mother. Lorna loves Peter Pan, ballet, books, drawing, and dolls. Imagine the scene when the two sisters play school with their dolls. Lorna wants a civilized school where her dolls line up quietly in their best clothes and draw pretty pictures. Lonnie brings in a gang of mutant monkey dolls and violent creatures to which she has added extra arms and legs and swollen heads. Lock up your daughters, bellows Lonnie, it’s time to rape and plunder Dolltown. Lorna’s best doll is stripped, kidnapped, and held hostage in her sister’s room until Lorna promises to treat freaks with respect. Amazingly, as the family lurches along through the 1950s and 1960s, Lorna not only treats her bizarre sister with respect, but with love. Lorna understands the rules of family disengagement early on and is helped out considerably by her rich and creative inner life. In high school, she finds her niche as an actress. On one memorable occasion when Lorna is a teenager, her TV executive father takes her to a hush-hush live taping of the Dave Clark Five. It’s 1966 and this British rock ‘n’ roll band is hot. Lorna not only watches the show but talks to one of the band members at the Hollywood Palace. Afterward she says, Daddy, the music was great. But these guys, they’re just guys. I thought they’d be special. When it comes time for college, Santa Cruz is the place for the artsy Lorna. Her parents finally divorce and her sister finds some stability in a Bakersfield half-way house. Her emotional life isn’t any easier, but Lorna is learning that she can cope, that she has coped, and that she isn’t responsible for everyone else. And that love has been with her all along. Fox steps back from a formidable childhood to write about painful issues with clarity and wit. Baby-boomers will enjoy this book, and it will bring hope to any despairing adolescent of today. Elisabeth Sherwin lives in Davis, California, where writes Printed Matter, a weekly column on books and writers.

Laurie Fox has managed to turn what could have been a harrowing and depressing autobiographical novel into a moving and funny story. Her style is brisk and readable. The bare facts are these: Lorna Person is born in 1952 to a suburban Los Angeles family.…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Patterson’s masterful mystery

Review by bookpagedev

Detective Alex Cross is back. There have been gruesome murders in the impoverished, prostitute-ridden, black sections of southeast Washington, D.C., and Cross is forced to investigate the deaths on his own time and behind the department’s back. It is a matter of personal conviction for Cross until the killer involves Cross’s family. If you read the opening chapter of Pop Goes the Weasel all three pages you’re hooked. From the author of Kiss the Girls, which was made into the thriller starring Morgan Freeman, Pop Goes the Weasel is just as cinematic. Written almost in movie scenes, it is a story told from the alternating points of view of both the killer and the detective. Patterson’s latest is definitely cat-and-mouse and allows us a front-row seat to the games which is exactly what this is to the killer.

Pop Goes the Weasel continues Patterson’s attempt to break a few mystery stereotypes. In a literary (and movie) world filled with white detectives and black thugs, drug pushers, and prostitutes, it is refreshing to read about a man like Alex Cross a psychologist, detective, FBI liaison, and a widower trying to raise a family and be effective at work at the same time. He’s a positive role model, an educated man, and just happens to be successful enough to drive a Porsche. He’s also a monogamous man in love.

There’s a social issue here that may or may not be true depending upon one’s interpretation of the statistics. Cross believes that the killers of established white people are found much quicker than the killers of lower-class minorities. It’s certainly the case in this novel and, if true, it’s a horrifying fact. Patterson certainly has a point to make, but rarely does he preach it, instead allowing readers to reach their own conclusions.

Pop Goes the Weasel is easily one of the most believable and well-written genre mysteries of 1999.

Clay Stafford is a writer and filmmaker.

Detective Alex Cross is back. There have been gruesome murders in the impoverished, prostitute-ridden, black sections of southeast Washington, D.C., and Cross is forced to investigate the deaths on his own time and behind the department's back. It is a matter of personal conviction for…

Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

At 84, Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow has produced a new novel as lively and engaging as any of his previous books. Like Humboldt’s Gift, which is a fictionalized portrait of the poet Delmore Schwartz, Ravelstein reportedly is based on the life and death of another of Bellow’s great friends, the political philosopher Allan Bloom, who became a worldwide celebrity with his own book, Closing of the American Mind.

A brilliant thinker, Abe Ravelstein is a true original, who embraces life with equal measures of Dionysian and Apollonian gusto. When his novelist friend, Chick, suggests he write a book for a popular audience, they are both surprised when it makes millions. Already accustomed to living large, the newly wealthy Ravelstein rewards Chick with a trip to Paris. Once ensconced in the opulent Hotel Crillon, Ravelstein surprises Chick with the request that the novelist write his biography.

Chick resists, but the idea sparks his voluminous memories of the intellectual sparring the two men have enjoyed. For many years, their diverging philosophies on everything from love, sex, mortality, history, and what it means to be a Jew, have inspired countless animated conversations, often punctuated with old vaudeville routines and off-color jokes. When Chick discovers that Ravelstein is dying of AIDS, the urgency of the appeal to write a memoir plagues the novelist. But until he has his own brush with death, Chick cannot begin to keep his promise to his departed friend.

As he ponders his course, Chick conjures up the wild details of Ravelstein’s eccentric life and the inextricable part he, himself, has played in it. Again and again, Chick returns to Ravelstein’s endorsement of Plato’s suggestion that man is incomplete, always searching for his missing half. This becomes the central point of the novel that these two men truly were each other’s missing half. Ravelstein shares similarities with Humboldt’s Gift, particularly its freewheeling first person narrative, which avoids linear chronology and ricochets with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of intellectual ideas and cultural references. But with Bellow, nothing is random, and it adds up to an all-encompassing, loving elegy for a friendship without equal. Caustic, compassionate, and philosophical, this is a book that only Bellow could have given us.

At 84, Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow has produced a new novel as lively and engaging as any of his previous books. Like Humboldt's Gift, which is a fictionalized portrait of the poet Delmore Schwartz, Ravelstein reportedly is based on the life and death of another…

Memoir

Review

Review by bookpagedev

The more I sifted through his life and mine, the more I tried to bring my father to myself, the more I recognized that what I was looking for lay somewhere between truth and imagination. Long before Deliverance, my father had begun to make himself up. And me. He would not tolerate for a minute the world as it was.

Christopher Dickey And you thought your family was dysfunctional. Journalist and sometime filmmaker Christopher Dickey had a problem: a living legend of poet-novelist father who, by force of personality and intellect, exerted a massive influence on everyone in his life. And when, with the publication of Deliverance, James Dickey’s celebrity exploded, the shrapnel helped send his wife to an alcoholic grave and his sons into desperate flight. How to communicate with a man who has devolved into besotted self-caricature? How much paternal drinkin’, cussin’, whorin’, and adventure can one exquisitely sensitive young man take? And how much brilliance? Dickey’s faith in his creative powers made him a great poet and, often, a wonderful father. It also permitted him to vanish into the stratosphere of vanity and self-indulgence.

Two decades after Deliverance the book and film, comes deliverance the family restoration. As Jim Dickey’s alcoholism and god-complex have spiraled out of control, he has become a broken old man. A second marriage has collapsed into violence and a teenage daughter is put at risk by the poison enveloping the family home. The crisis calls the author back to his father and young half-sister and sets the stage for the reconciliation and healing at the core of this lovely book.

Admirers of the elder Dickey’s work will, of course, be enthralled by the biography. By turns lyrical and visceral, the book’s language brings us to a vivid, even unnerving, intimacy with Jim Dickey as father, husband, and poet. As memoir, the author’s candor and unflinching self-scrutiny lend the book an added weight; Chris Dickey is just as willing to lay bare his own faults and failings as anyone else’s. Finally, the younger Dickey’s journalistic background gives Summer of Deliverance its unique edge. The sensibility of an observer-chronicler contrasts beautifully with Jim Dickey’s credo of artistic daring and self-invention. In his waning days, the father who sought not to reflect but to create worlds with his verse begs the son to remember him just as he was to make history of myth. The book has become between them a search for the truth of their family’s history, of the passage of their lives together and apart. Not the stuff of Jim Dickey’s primal dramas but rendered with an intensity and precision no less remarkable. The younger Dickey’s struggle not merely to tolerate but to embrace and forgive to know his father, invests the book with an urgency and power well beyond that of finely wrought reminiscence. More than the biography of a celebrated literary figure, it is a delicate examination of creativity and of the power of familial bonds a peacemaking with the joys and sorrows of their world as it was.

Christopher Lawrence is a writer-researcher at Vanity Fair in New York City.

The more I sifted through his life and mine, the more I tried to bring my father to myself, the more I recognized that what I was looking for lay somewhere between truth and imagination. Long before Deliverance, my father had begun to make himself…

Religion & Spirituality

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Awakening to the Sacred is further proof that Eastern thought continues to influence a certain kind of American mind one formed by Western religious values, but not content with the usual Western answers to key questions of meaning.

In the 19th century similar aspects of Indian thought influenced Emerson and Thoreau, as they attempted to deepen their spiritual lives. With this book Indian thought has gone through a Tibetan filter and returned again to New England (where the author lives) and to American mainstream spiritual seekers: readers of all faiths who seek a deeper spiritual life, who, like Emerson and Thoreau, are looking for answers to life’s big questions.

Author of the best-selling Awakening the Buddha Within, Lama Surya Das started as a Jewish American seeking spiritual growth. He spent several years in India training as a Tibetan Buddhist monk and also trained in Japan as a Zen monk. Das’s purpose in this book is to help the reader see if some aspects of Tibetan Buddhism might encourage spiritual growth. Because different people have diverse spiritual needs and dissimilar backgrounds, Das provides an exceptionally wide range of behaviors and practices from which to choose.

All the practices are based on a simple perspective: enlightenment is about the daily experience of reality, not some otherworldly experience. For example, Das quotes the great Zen master Dogen about the value of meditation: Don’t doubt its possibilities because of the simplicity of its method. If you can’t find the truth right where you are, where else do you think you’ll find it? For the mainstream spiritual seeker, this book has achieved its purpose to provide specific advice for the beginning steps on the path to awakening. Provided they practice the exercises, readers using this book can develop a deeper spirituality in daily life. As the Buddha said: Try it and see that is the best approach.

Douglas J. Durham has practiced Theravada Buddhism since 1992.

Awakening to the Sacred is further proof that Eastern thought continues to influence a certain kind of American mind one formed by Western religious values, but not content with the usual Western answers to key questions of meaning.

In the 19th century…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Anyone who has followed the sleuthing of Kinsey Millhone won’t be surprised to hear that Sue Grafton, in this 15th installment of what many people call the Alphabet Murder series, has been successful again. What will surprise readers is the journey into Kinsey Millhone’s past, something that until now, Grafton has withheld (well, save for some tidbits here and there). In fact, O Is for Outlaw is solely about Kinsey’s past. And because it is, readers are treated to aspects of Kinsey’s personality that make the character more real, more fallible, infinitely more interesting. The book begins when a shifty character contacts Millhone claiming to have a box full of Millhone’s personal documents. This event pulls Kinsey into a web of intrigue that forces her to confront some very real demons, some her own making, some the making of others. Thus, Millhone reassesses choices she made regarding her ex-husband and their marriage and sets out to right wrongs before it’s too late. In sum: She’s on the case, tracking a 20-year-old murder, navigating the very tricky path of memory, while, at the same time, trying to come to grips with choices she made long ago. One of the reasons O Is for Outlaw is so intriguing has less to do with the actual mystery and everything to do with Kinsey Millhone’s moral dilemma and it’s a doozy of a dilemma. In the interim, readers are treated to Grafton’s expert storytelling abilities, coupled with her subtle sense of humor. Kinsey is still funny, quick-witted, and charmingly self-reflective. It’s Kinsey’s honesty that makes her so endearing.

This isn’t the normal whodunit. Rather, this book is about the wonderful details of Kinsey’s former life. Grafton has opened a new door, but what next? O Is for Outlaw makes you want more: more Kinsey, more information, more mysteries being solved by this tough cookie, who isn’t as tough as she thinks.

Anyone who has followed the sleuthing of Kinsey Millhone won't be surprised to hear that Sue Grafton, in this 15th installment of what many people call the Alphabet Murder series, has been successful again. What will surprise readers is the journey into Kinsey Millhone's past,…

NonfictionTrue Crime

Review

Review by bookpagedev

It is impossible to read The Murder of Helen Jewett and not be reminded of the O.

J. Simpson murder trial. The similarities are striking: a beautiful young woman found murdered, the victim of a brutal slashing; a handsome, prosperous man arrested for the crime; a mad scramble by reporters to reveal every detail of the case; a high-profile trial complete with bungling prosecutors and slick defense attorneys; and finally, a stunning acquittal of the accused.

So why bother reading Patricia Cline Cohen’s account of a 19th-century prostitute when we have O.

J.? Perhaps to understand that history does repeat itself; maybe to realize that elements we find abhorrent about today’s legal system and media coverage have been commonplace since the infancy of our nation; or simply because the demise of Helen Jewett makes for an interesting potboiler.

Cohen is a professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and she approaches her subject with the keen eye of an historian. This prosaic style can lead to some dry spots in the text. There is, for instance, more information than most readers need about the history of the sex trade in New York City, the setting for the story. But much of the chronicle of Helen Jewett’s life and violent death is engrossing, and the care Cohen gives to relating each detail paints a vivid portrait of the crime.

Helen Jewett was discovered murdered in her bed on April 10, 1836. Three bloody gashes covered her face, and her body had been set on fire by her assailant. When the flames were extinguished, constables discovered a man’s handkerchief near the bed. Later, a hatchet was found in the back yard. Evidence quickly mounted against Richard P. Robinson, a frequent client and sometime suitor of Jewett. The mercantile clerk, an educated man from an established East Coast family, was arrested, setting the stage for a lurid passion play that enthralled New York and the nation.

Among the more interesting facets of the book is Cohen’s analysis of how the press covered the crime and subsequent trial. Jewett’s murder occurred at the beginning of a circulation war among a dozen or so New York newspapers, many of which used the grisly crime to sell more copies. The intense competition compelled reporters to constantly dig for new information, and some resorted to fabricating evidence and confessions. Even the reputable newspapers were forced to chose between responsible journalism and higher revenues, most settling for the latter.

Actions in the courtroom were equally reprehensible. Cohen shows how the prosecution failed to introduce key evidence, including a series of love letters between Jewett and Robinson. One of the last letters Robinson wrote was threatening in nature. Meanwhile, his trio of high-profile lawyers took courtroom oratory to new heights, mesmerizing the jury. Robinson’s eventual acquittal resulted in the same kind of shock waves as when Simpson was found not guilty.

The Helen Jewett case ultimately fails to match the excitement and emotion generated by the Simpson trial. But readers can come away from Cohen’s book with a deeper historical perspective of the imperfections inherent in the criminal justice system and the press and a realization of how little things have changed in 160 years.

John T. Slania is a writer from Chicago.

It is impossible to read The Murder of Helen Jewett and not be reminded of the O.

J. Simpson murder trial. The similarities are striking: a beautiful young woman found murdered, the victim of a brutal slashing; a handsome, prosperous man arrested…

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Women’s natural aptitudes, the rate at which women the world over are pouring into the work force, the international baby boom, and menopause. Based on these four factors, Helen Fisher makes what she calls an immodest proposal : women will dramatically influence 21st-century life. The First Sex describes the forms that influence will take in the work place, the media, schools, the bedroom, and the family.

Fisher’s contention that women are the first sex biologically and in many spheres of economic and social life will undoubtedly raise conservative hackles. It may not sit well with some feminists either. Her argument that inherited gender differences account for women’s natural talents, such as skill with words, empathy, patience, a gift for negotiation, and an impulse to nurture, skirts uncomfortably close to the chauvinist adage that biology is destiny.

Overall, however, this controversial compendium of bold statements, supported by vast amounts of biological and anthropological research, is persuasive partly, no doubt, because Fisher’s writing style makes the material accessible. One of the most entertaining aspects of The First Sex is how its author uses delightful, often surprising quotes to set the context for her arguments. She brackets a section on women and education, for example, between quotes from Mae West, Brains are an asset, if you hide them, and William Butler Yeats, Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire. Baby boomers not surprisingly, Fisher is one will find particularly intriguing Fisher’s celebration of the mighty menopause. She quotes anthropological studies of traditional societies around the world to show that postmenopausal women become powerful economically, socially, politically, and/or spiritually. Because of freedom from child raising responsibilities and the physiological changes that occur as higher concentrations of male hormones course through their blood streams, middle-aged women become action-oriented, confident, forthright, and uninhibited. The huge cohort of women boomers has reached middle age and, as Fisher puts it, they are about to shake things up. Connie Miller lives and writes in Seattle, Washington.

Women's natural aptitudes, the rate at which women the world over are pouring into the work force, the international baby boom, and menopause. Based on these four factors, Helen Fisher makes what she calls an immodest proposal : women will dramatically influence 21st-century life. The…
Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Within the first two paragraphs of A Spring of Souls by William Cobb, the author makes it palpably clear that you are in the world of the South. Although set against the warm familiarity of orange earth and kudzu, Cobb’s Piper, Alabama, could be any modern-day place, plagued by violence, political extremism, and the disconnect between parents and children. His creation is a timeless town filled with characters as peculiar as they are plentiful. The events of the book, too, seem jarring but familiar at the same time, and so the reader is hooked from the beginning, trusting that whoever and whatever appears, the ride through the pages will be worth the pleasure in itself.

A Spring of Souls revolves around the life of Brenda Boykin, a strong and believable focus for depicting redemption in these troubling American times. Our heroine returns to the small town she left behind soon after high school. Dizzying and funny, disturbing and comforting, her return signals something phenomenal. She and her fellow characters children, lost loves, peers, local law enforcement make simple decisions and cosmic mistakes, all of which provide a momentum that is compelling to see through to the end. It reads a bit like a thinking person’s tabloid full of passion and violence, opposing opinions on social and political issues, clashing classes and broken dreams but deconstructed to the point of credibility all the way.

Cobb uses more graphic depictions in some of the story’s events to elicit an emotional response as well as tell the tale. His gift for storytelling becomes more evident with each new character introduced into the scenes of Wembly County, where the ever-widening sphere of the mystical realm meets stark reality. Like a Mount Olympus or Valhalla, the geographical area of the book is home to people of lasting and powerful strengths and frailties, their actions seeming to be the sum of human evolution as well as those of individuals stumbling along the path of human experience. What you take away from this story may indicate how sure-footed you are. ¦ Fran Hatton is a freelance writer and editor working in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Within the first two paragraphs of A Spring of Souls by William Cobb, the author makes it palpably clear that you are in the world of the South. Although set against the warm familiarity of orange earth and kudzu, Cobb's Piper, Alabama, could be any…

Audio

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Frank O’Connell had been struggling with his lot in life since he married Moira. As a young lawyer with a bright future, beautiful wife and son, and a partnership in his wealthy and powerful father-in-law’s practice, Frank seemed to have everything. Then something changes. He begins searching for that one thing that defines a person’s powerful sense of self-worth. He could no longer find it at home or at the office. So he gives up his perfect life to become a court-appointed attorney at the beck-and-call of drug-users and petty criminals. After experiencing life at the opposite end of the spectrum, however, Frank isn’t so sure he has made the right decision.

Welcome to Stephen Horn’s debut legal thriller, In Her Defense. As a former prosecutor for the Justice Department, Horn has lived the stuff of which the very best legal thrillers are made. He’s quick to point out there are many things he can’t reveal about his career. But what he can glean from his experience, he does in this incredible story of one man’s struggle to bring justice into the world, and maybe even find himself along the way.

Horn’s lead character is pondering his life-changing decision one day as he enters the cellblock that houses one of his clients another defendant in a drug case. That’s where Frank meets Ashley Bronson, a gorgeous socialite in prison for the murder of former Agriculture Secretary and long-time family friend, Raymond Garvey. Ashley decides she wants Frank to plead her case. She is convinced that Garvey’s actions drove her father to commit suicide. Before the trial ends, Frank will reveal to Ashley the truth about her father, his invention, and a life-long friend, and some shocking history about the United States government.

Horn’s main characters are at odds, at times, with issues of right and wrong. Some are naive to the ways of the justice system; others, long since jaded. But they all blend to make this story riveting. We want Frank to save Ashley and we want him to save himself, too. After all, if he can, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us. Sonya Beasley, a native Mississippian, is hopelessly devoted to her husband Scott, and her hamster Penelope.

Frank O'Connell had been struggling with his lot in life since he married Moira. As a young lawyer with a bright future, beautiful wife and son, and a partnership in his wealthy and powerful father-in-law's practice, Frank seemed to have everything. Then something changes. He…

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