cover image Enchanted Evening Barbie and the Second Coming: A Memoir

Enchanted Evening Barbie and the Second Coming: A Memoir

Rheta Grimsley Johnson, . . C&M Online Media/New South, $23.95 (197pp) ISBN 978-1-58838-250-4

Longtime syndicated columnist and author Johnson (Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz ) fashions a series of subtly toned, mildly humorous essays that move chronologically through her upbringing as a Southern Baptist and career as a dogged reporter. Christmas provided her cherished early memories growing up in the 1950s and '60s, and several of the essays revolve around the holiday spent either in Montgomery, Ala.; Pensacola, Fla.; and southwest Ga., where her family had roots: in “Rapture on Hold,” she learned that Santa Claus was a fraud, and thus she “gave up most beliefs in the supernatural,” while in “Building the Cross Fence,” she finally got the horse of her dreams, but realized “the real deal scared the hell out of me.” Her first love was a romantic born-again proselytizer at Robert E. Lee High School (“Brad had this way of multiplying his women like loaves and fishes”), though she married fellow newspaperman Jimmy Johnson at the Auburn (Ala.) Plainsman . Together they toiled at their own weekly newspaper on St. Simon's Island, Ga., before taking work at different newspapers across the South and eventually divorcing. Travels with her late love and husband, academic and duck-hunter Don Grierson (now deceased), occupy the later essays, forming a poignant conclusion to the notable story of this devoted journalist. (Apr.)