The Night Train is a loosely plotted novel about two adolescent boys, one black and one white, in a small Southern town in 1963. Larry Lime wants to play the piano like Thelonius Monk. His white friend Dwayne wants to recreate James Brown’s album Live at the Apollo. Together they have a forbidden...
This is my second Clyde Edgerton book and another fun experience full of quirky Southern characters, but not too much so, and situations that have you alternately chuckling and shaking your head. If I were to provide much of the plot it could interfere with others' future enjoyment of the story s...
When Clyde Edgerton was four years old, his mother took him to the local airport to see the planes. For Edgerton, it was love at first sight. Eighteen years later, she would take him to the same airport to catch a flight to Texas for Air Force pilot training. In Solo, Edgerton tells the story of ...
A fave — better than his 'Walking to Egypt.' A big rackety cast of misfits find each other and end up forming a band. Music is a redeeming force. Several characters lead lives of uncomplaining sacrifice, which deepens the moral tone.
RANEY, Clyde Edgerton's first novel on why it's not a sin to marry a Whiskeypalian even when you are a Free-Will Baptist First of all, the illustration of Raney by Clyde Edgerton is not that of the first edition, first printing. Seeing as how I'm a goodreads librarian I should fix that. First E...
I like Clyde Edgerton. He does lovely Southern dialect (it isn't quite Louisiana, but then it's not meant to be) and he is very, very good at bringing out both the intrinsic goodness of his characters and their inability to see another point of view. And quite often that's the center of his nov...
Many baby boomers, especially those of us who are closer to 70 years of age now than we are to 60, are caretakers of our parents. Some of those eighty-and-ninety-something-year-olds live with one of their children and some of them are living in assisted living facilities or in nursing homes. Clyd...
The Copeland family of Listre, North Carolina, goes back a long way. Each family member has a story to tell, and stories to be told about one another. Albert Copeland, the head of the family, writes it all down in the notebooks he started once to track the progress of the floatplanes he built, th...
1857's horrific Mountain Meadows Massacre - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountai... - was mentioned in some detail in Mark Twain's Roughing It, and reading that made me want to learn more on the subject. I remember reading about the incident for the first time in Edgerton's book and decided ...
We’d also learn about problems that fighter-bomber pilots might encounter on bombing runs in Southeast Asia while we, as FACs, directed them from the OV-10. Those of us who had already flown fighters were not exempt from this training. Among the T-33 trainees were older pilots who’d flown all kin...
Mrs. Albright’s faded red plank house, his destination, stood down the hard-frozen dirt road, the morning sun lighting the side of it.New electric wires, strung from poles, hummed and seemed to silence the rest of the world. Frost sparkled in the road ditch. Henry was glad he wore his hat with th...