Bronwen Dickey

Hitch-22: A Memoir By Christopher Hitchens Twelve, 422 pp. “It is not possible for long,” Christopher Hitchens writes in his memoir, Hitch-22, “to be just a little heretical.” And no polemicist delights in his heresies as much as Hitchens does. For almost four decades, this columnist for The Atlantic, Vanity Fair and Slate has made […]

WAR By Sebastian Junger Twelve, 268 pp. To a civilian reader, the word “outpost,” at least insofar as the modern American military is concerned, might connote some level of permanence or structure, or at least a little bit of brick-and-mortar security. But not if you’re talking about Afghanistan, and not if the year is 2007, […]

Bricks Without Straw: A Novel By Albion W. Tourgée, Edited by Carolyn L. Karcher Duke University Press, 432 pp. If you grew up in the American South, or if you’ve spent a fair amount of time here, you probably understand that the term “carpetbagger” is not often spoken with much warmth (at least, not how […]

Serena: A Novel By Ron Rash Ecco Books (HarperCollins), 384 pp. In the late 1920s, before George Pemberton’s Boston Lumber Company constructed its western North Carolina logging campthe setting for Ron Rash’s haunting fourth novel, Serenait set aside a portion of its land for a graveyard. This was a practical consideration, an acknowledgment of the […]

Escape from Andersonville: A Novel of the Civil War By Gene Hackman and Daniel Lenihan St. Martin’s Press, 342 pp. The voice of Gene Hackman: Over the course of his 40-plus years in cinema, it has been street-tough (The French Connection), gleefully villainous (Superman), on-your-feet inspiring (Hoosiers), and solidly terrifying (Unforgiven), but there’s a consistent […]

The Garden of Last Days By Andre Dubus III W.W. Norton & Company, 537 pp. “The job description for the author,” Andre Dubus III once told an interviewer, “is to imagine the lives of others.” Writing, he said, is “a sustained act of empathy.” Like his last novel, 1999’s House of Sand and Fog, his […]

A Nuclear Family Vacation: Travels in the World of Atomic Weaponry By Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger Bloomsbury USA, 240 pp. In January 2007, the Board of Directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of its Doomsday Clockperhaps the most widely recognized symbol of the Cold Warforward two minutes, indicating its […]

Cornbread Nation 4: The Best of Southern Food Writing Edited by Dale Volberg Reed and John Shelton Reed General editor: John T. Edge University of Georgia Press, 308 pp. Not long ago, I learned that the Central Coffee Shop in Manning, S.C., a backwater greasy spoon where my parents and I spent many sweltering Carolina […]