Bombingham.by Anthony Grooms Free Press. 304 pages. $24.00 In Bombingham, a fine new novel by Anthony Grooms, we are given an insider's view of Birmingham, Alabama Birmingham (pronounced [ˈbɝmɪŋˌhæm]) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Alabama and is the county seat of Jefferson County. , at the height of the civil rights movement. Walter Burke, an American GI serving in Vietnam, recounts the year 1963. Many Americans will remember it for the firebombing Firebombing is a bombing technique designed to damage a target, generally an urban area, through the use of fire from a incendiary device, rather than from the blast effect of large bombs. of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which left four little girls dead and galvanized gal·va·nize tr.v. gal·va·nized, gal·va·niz·ing, gal·va·niz·es 1. To stimulate or shock with an electric current. 2. the nation. But Walter remembers it as the year his mother died of cancer, when he was eleven years old. With lyric lyric, in ancient Greece, a poem accompanied by a musical instrument, usually a lyre. Although the word is still often used to refer to the songlike quality in poetry, it is more generally used to refer to any short poem that expresses a personal emotion, be it a intensity and quiet authority, Grooms writes the story not included in news headlines or historical retrospectives. He reminds us that the civil rights movement, like all cultural movements, is about the people who make up the families, which make up the neighborhoods, which make up the cities, which make up our nation. In Grooms's world, the grief of an eleven-year-old boy matters, just as the bus boycotts and freedom marches that change his community forever. With unflinching honesty and even humor humor, according to ancient theory, any of four bodily fluids that determined man's health and temperament. Hippocrates postulated that an imbalance among the humors (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile) resulted in pain and disease, and that good health was , Bombingham is an American treasure. Grooms documents our national struggles in all their complexities and contradictions. This is an important novel, one that will last. |
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