In A Sweet Magnolia Time makes a major contribution to American history and American literature, for it explores the life and times and legacy of Waties Waring, the South Carolina federal judge whose epic opinion in Briggs v. Elliot that “separate but equal is not equal,” predated by two years of the 1954 Supreme Court Decision that came to the same conclusion.
A young man of promise in the late 60s veers to LSD and cosmic light. Stepping away from university to cult life, he steps into pastel jammies, chanting, dancing and tingling finger cymbals. Passersby yell and laugh, and he laughs back, niched in bliss. Natural intelligence takes him to operational management, as labor and meditation define purpose for years, until . . . Harsh truth drops like a turd in the punch bowl, a small one, but still. Would you like a cup? He'd challenged the elders of his childhood. What did you do, when you had the chance? The question comes back, calling for strange absolution and justice served. Despairing a bleak future and potential wasted, he meditates on a bong like 1969 and phones a friend. The story resolves on challenge, endurance and revelation. Drawn on real-time, Solomon Kursh reveals the '60s in nuance and character rarely available in material based on that era. As usual with Robert Wintner, irony, wicked humor, insight and laugh-aloud aberration result in page-turning entertainment.
Robust yet complex, these vintage domestics sparkle on the palate with innuendo and overtone. Fruity, nutty, buttery in part; the oak is constrained, the acid balanced with an easy follow and hardly a recoil on the pungent recollection.
The Modern Outlaws are men convened by chance for a motorcycle trip through Montana. Understated with expressions of good taste, they suffer the common lust. Rapacious appetite for wine and women leads to thundering obtrusion on sleepy hamlets and shady dives, where they take what may be taken. Buster hides his hostility. Stuey triumphs over poverty with excessive chrome, including braces at forty-five. Wheelie must prove his namesake. Derek is happily married, suave and shameless. Wade is stoned. Dave takes blood pressure pills at the pinnacle of industrial leverage. Rodney is Born Again and a petty thief. Joe is a sociopath.Its all around the table with glad-handing and too many names to remember and just as many i.d.s, and we laugh like honest men at a Rotary luncheon. We shake hands on our new business, understanding that it doesnt mean shit, not one speck of it, because getting lost and becoming someone else begins with the utterance of your very name. This is the roll call of resurrection morn. Im Buster. I sell microscopes.The early years were gilded with promise, but this is now, what happened to us. The outlaws emerge, reflected or mocked by their custom motorcycles.