Choice Review
The title of this volume comes from James Agee, whose emphasis on social and cultural concerns in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) is reflected in this volume's 16 essays, though most contributors discuss more recent eras than Agee's Depression South. Susan Goodman's analysis of William Styron and Sherley Ann Williams's novels about slave uprisings is an important exception, and Goodman presents the "competing histories" as imaginative contemporary re-creations. Other essays cover a diverse range of issues--civil rights in Alice Walker (by Keith Byerman), class and gender in Dorothy Allison (Moira P. Baker), death row in Ernest Gaines (John Lowe), survivor guilt in Kaye Gibbons (Linda Watts), the transition from rural to urban Louisiana in James Lee Burke (Frank W. Shelton), southern religious experience in Horton Foote (Gerald C. Wood), the contemporary, nonviolent West in Frederick Barthelme (Robert H. Brinkmeyer). Other essayists include Jeffrey Folks, Suzanne W. Jones, Gary M. Ciuba, James Grove, Julius Raper, Barbara Bennett, Linda J. Byrd, and Joanna Price. The editors' introduction succinctly summarizes a quarter-century of literary scholarship with a social focus. Strongly recommended for all academic libraries, lower-division undergraduate level and above. J. W. Hall; University of Mississippi