Norman Mcmillan is co-author of Three Generations of Warriors: The Argonne Forest, The Flying Tigers, and the Skies of Vietnam and was the recipient of the Eugene Current-Garcia Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Literary Scholar.
"Norman McMillan charms us with this coming-of-age story of a son
devoted to an ardent, ambitious mother, a woman who rises to the
challenge of poverty and the shame of her husband's defeat, who
shakes up the world of rural Alabama with her progressive ideas
about race and education. As an imaginative son, McMillan moves
with grace through the difficult world of childhood, and thanks to
his sister Evelyn, sees beyond that world to the broader frontiers
of adulthood."--Patricia Foster, author of All the Lost Girls
"Norman McMillan's Distant Son tells of coming of age mostly in
Hale County and then near Tuscaloosa in clear-eyed prose that is
witty, poignant, and sometimes hysterically bawdy. Thanks to booze,
the Depression, and ten children in a row, the McMillans fell on
hard times and ended up sharecropping from place to place. They
knew one thing, though: they wanted those children educated and
they'd do anything to see to it--sell anything, go anywhere, beg,
borrow, and work like the Devil. In the end, Distant Son is a
tragicomedy that tells of a world that seems both far away and
right next door." --Judith Hillman Paterson, author of Sweet
Mystery
"Norman McMillan's great memoir is in the high tradition of Rick
Bragg's All Over But the Shoutin' and Janisse Ray's Ecology of a
Cracker Childhood. McMillan had one shining moment which makes his
memoir the most Southern I have ever read. When the family mule
died, his father hitched Norman and his brother up to the jo harrow
and finished plowing the field. This now stands as my favorite
moment in Southern literature." --Pat Conroy, author of The Great
Santini and The Prince of Tides
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