Coming Home

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They are a vanload of pilgrims, climbing through the swirling snow of a late December night from the Denver airport up toward ski country -- a family from Missouri, another from North Carolina, a couple of college kids headed home for the holidays. And the Guitar Man.

Home to Robert Inman is Elba, Alabama, where he grew up and where his grandmother lived. But his stories--all of them true, he assures us--encompass everything south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Inman writes about Vacation Bible School, a must for Elba's Methodist faithful; southern politicians; the differences between North and South Carolina; small-town radio stations; the joys of Thanksgiving and Christmas; University of Alabama football; the painful process of writing; weddings and marriages; and his "beautiful, warm-hearted, generous, even-tempered, talented, and witty" wife, Paulette. Inman, author of three novels and seven screenplays, devotes a section of the book to his friend Delbert Earle, who wants to ban the month of February with its "dismal drearies": snow and ice, gloom and angst, and public unrest and domestic discontent. And there's much more in this delightful collection of memoirs, down-home storytelling at its best.

George Cohen