Bombingham.

• Author: Jones, Tayari

by Anthony Grooms

Free Press. 304 pages. $24.00

In Bombingham, a fine new novel by Anthony Grooms, we are given an insider's view of Birmingham, Alabama, at the height of the civil rights movement.

Walter Burke, an American GI serving in Vietnam, recounts the year 1963. Many Americans will remember it for the firebombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which left four little girls dead and galvanized the nation. But Walter remembers it as the year his mother died of cancer, when he was eleven years old.

With lyric intensity and quiet authority, Grooms writes the story not included in news headlines or historical retrospectives. He reminds us that the civil rights movement, like all cultural movements, is about the people who make...