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Albert French joined the US Marine Corps in 1963 when he was 19 years old. Two years later he went to Vietnam and experienced the war at its absolute worst. Many of French's closest friends were killed; he was severely wounded. When he recovered, French returned to his hometown of Pittsburgh, tried college, and then landed a job as a photographer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. After 13 years, he left to publish his own magazine, Pittsburgh Preview. When that magazine failed in the late '80s, French fell apart emotionally. In despair, he began writing a memoir, which eventually became this primal scream of a book. During the years it took for the memoir to be accepted for publication, French (whose first cousin is the writer John Edgar Wideman) wrote and published two well-received novels: Billy (1993) and Holly (1995); neither one has anything to do with the Vietnam War. Patches of Fire has as its core French's war-zone and postwar experiences. The author tells his story in a blistering, almost stream-of-consciousness fashion, shifting the narrative adroitly between past and present. French is less concerned with providing factual detail than with painting word pictures that bring alive his deepest emotional reactions to the memorable events in his life.
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 CinderClick to order via Amazon Paperback: 256 pages Banes, Mississippi, 1938. The Catfish creek separates the Patch from the town, black from white. These worlds and their prejudices are hauntingly evoked in the rich accents of the American South. Cinder is a woman who belongs to neither, her beauty marking her out as different. Time passes slowly, and the inhabitants of Banes follow the same daily rhythm as they have done for years. Shorty sweeps up in Mister Macky’s store, then drinks his wages at LeRoy's bar, men sit spitting outside the Rosey Gray, old people watch the world go by from their porches. But one quiet Sunday morning, when the bombs are dropped on Pearl Harbor, change comes to this small Mississippi town. Spanning four years, Cinder is the follow-up to Albert French’s outstanding novel Billy. It is at once the story of a woman whose life has been torn apart by tragedy, and the portrait of a town divided. It is about loss, community, history and the ties that bind.
ISBN: 0385483678 Read Chapter One from I can't wait on God Homewood, PA, 1950. Where the "summer night air was always sticky kind of air, that had that stinkin mill smoke stuck all in it." Where "Gus Goins's place was down off the tracks, down in that alley behind Fiance St." It is a place very different from James Agee's "Knoxville: Summer 1915" but no less lyrical--only the rhythms are different, a blues beat as opposed to symphonic strains. For alley residents, the struggles and joys of "gettin on" are momentarily disrupted by the knifing of a local pimp. Using this death as his focal point, French explores the denizens' hopes, dreams, frustrations, and sorrows. For Willet, the perpetrator, whom the pimp was hoping to add to his stable, it brings, beyond access to cash and a car and the need to flee, a resolve to see the son she once abandoned--no matter what the cost. For Mack Jack the sax man, it's about reclaiming his musical voice; for Dicky Bird, it's about scrounging enough cash picking trash to be able to afford Gus's chicken and drink. In simple, eloquent strokes French brings the alley and its people to vibrant life. A marvelous exploration of the complexities of the human experience by a vastly talented if not yet widely known author (Billy, LJ 10/1/93); highly recommended for all libraries.-- David W. Henderson, Library Journal
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 Click to order via Amazon ISBN: 0140179089 Albert French's harrowing debut novel of 10-year-old Billy Lee Turner, convicted and executed for murdering a white girl in Baines, Mississippi, in 1937, is an unsentimental and ultimately heartrending vision of racial injustice. "A work of art . . . Billy never lets up, not for one minute. . . . magnificent." –New York Daily News. Albert French lights up the monstrous face of American racism in this harrowing tale of ten-year-old Billy Lee Turner, who is convicted of and executed for murdering a white girl in Banes County, Mississippi in 1937. Billy is about the deaths of two children, one girl, one boy, the girl's death an accident, the boy's a murder perpetrated by the state. Though the events Billy records occur during the 1930s in a small Mississippi town, the range of characters, emotions, and social forces, and the inexorable march to doom of a ten-year-old boy and the society that dooms him, catapult the story far beyond a specific time and location. Narrated by an anonymous observer in the rich accents of the region, constructed in a series of powerfully lean vignettes, Billy imparts an intensity that is nearly unbearable. It is a tour de force of dramatic compression. Albert French evokes with cinematic vividness the picking fields and town streets; the heat, the dust, the unrelenting sun, the poverty of 1930s Mississippi. High-spirited Billy; his mysterious and passionate mother, Cinder; his friend, Gumpy; and other characters black and white are realized with depth and authority. Told in classic, unrelieved terms yet with remarkable compassion and restraint, their story is an unsentimental and ultimately heart-rending vision of racial injustice. Billy is, quite simply, one of the most powerfully affecting novels to come along in years. Editors Note: Billy is one of my favorite books. |
 Holly
Click to order via Amazon ISBN: 014024025X From the acclaimed author of Billy comes another powerful tale of race
and tragedy. 1944: In a small North Carolina town, a lonely white girl's
listless life is transformed by a young, handsome, educated black soldier
back from the war. Billy tells the story of the town's savage response to
their romance. |
I
Can't Wait on God
 Click to order via Amazon ISBN: 0385483635 Patches of Fire is the story of a young man's encounter with a war and with deaths beyond his understanding; of his return to a country torn by racial unrest in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.; and of his painstaking efforts to defeat his inner demons and make a place for himself as a black man in white America. With a starkness tempered by humor, French brings to life the horrors of Vietnam, and recounts in compelling detail his uneasy tenure as a newspaper photographer, his heady days as publisher of his own magazine, his confrontations with the ghostly images of Vietnam that haunted his dreams - and the sense of renewal and purpose he achieved as a novelist. The very personal story of French's trials and triumphs, Patches of Fire is also a revealing exploration of the black soldier's experience in Vietnam, the plight of the Vietnam veteran, and the redemptive power of writing. |
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