Whiskey Man

Raines's coming-of-age novel, set in depression-era Alabama, combinesromance and tragedy to evoke a time and place distant in memory but alivein the great tradition of American storytelling. In 1932 in Milo, Alabama, Prohibition was on, the depressionwas on, Franklin D. Roosevelt was riding his campaign train across America,and Bluenose Trogdon--a man who had a real calling for making whiskey justlike his daddy before him--had devoted customers as far away asBirmingham. One of the people he was on good terms with was BrantLaster, just home from The University of Alabama and the first of his familyto graduate. For Brant it was a time to renew ties of love and friendship--withhis kind, upright father, who had a suitable Scripture to go with everysale he made at his general store; with Bluenose; and with Brant's girl,slender, pale-haired Blake King. Blake--in her own view liberated by hercollege years in Atlanta, though in Brant's eyes corrupted by the men shemet there--stirs him to the thought that "every man is his own Iago." Butit is Bluenose--boozy, profane, lustful, wise, comic, racked by passionfor the wife who shuns him--whose inevitable fate finally sets Brant onhis journey into the world.