Walking Toward Home

by James Everett Kibler

By turns humorous, satiric, and poignant, this novel is peopled by true individuals who have grown wise from experience. They have all been knocked low but have continued to walk on.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2004

About the author

James Everett Kibler is a novelist, poet, and professor of English at the University of Georgia, where he teaches popular courses in Southern literature, examining such figures as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Wendell Berry, and Larry Brown. Born and raised in upcountry South Carolina, Kibler spends much of his spare time tending to the renovation of an 1804 plantation home and the reforestation of the surrounding acreage. This home served as the subject of his first book, Our Fathers' Fields: A Southern Story, for which he was awarded the prestigious Fellowship of Southern Writers Award for Nonfiction in 1999 and the Southern Heritage Society's Award for Literary Achievement.

Kibler received his doctorate from the University of South Carolina, and his poetry has been honored by the Poetry Society of South Carolina and has appeared in publications throughout the country. In October 2004, the League of the South bestowed on him the Jefferson Davis Lifetime Achievement Award.

Kibler enjoys gardening, organic farming, and research into Southern history and culture. An avid preservationist, he prescribes to Allen Tate's comment that "the task of the civilized intelligence is perpetual salvage." He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the Southern Garden History Society, the League of the South, and the William Gilmore Simms Society. He is listed in Contemporary Writers', "Who's Who in America," and "Who's Who in the World." He divides his time between Whitmire, South Carolina, and Athens, Georgia.

Reviews

[Keagan And · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s as if Kibler is writing about a time 40-50 years ago, a time when traditions and customs and landscapes were fading, except it takes place in the 2000s, or at least the late 90s, when those things were already gone for the most part. Is he writing about how things still ought to be but aren’t, or does he not know (at the time of writing) that that reality is already gone? If he had set this in the late 1960s or in the 1970s or maybe even early 1980s it wouldn’t seem out of place.

[Pa · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's rare that I do not finish a book (I am an almost compulsive finisher); however, I stopped this one about half way through. I found these anecdotes about rural southern life to be mostly boring and not at all engaging. Perhaps it was just the mood I was in at the time, but I can not recommend this book.

[Matt Carpenter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Parts of this book were laugh-out-loud funny, and other parts were somewhat dull. I go for Southern nostalgia, but it was a little too thick in spots.