Books by Walter Bennett
“A brilliant meditation on the passing and relevance of time.”
- Lee Smith, Author of Blue Marlin
The Last First Kiss
Ace Sinclair has one eye on a hurricane churning up from the south and the other on his old high school sweetheart, J’nelle Reade, whom he has invited, on impulse, to spend a weekend with him at his Outer Banks beach house. Now in their seventies, both widowed, Ace and J’nelle expect to relive old memories. They soon discover that the past is still with them more than they know, and they are pulled into a haunting search among old memories of betrayals, mistakes and missed chances for the illusive truth of their lives. As a dangerous hurricane turns in the Atlantic and heads their way, time runs short, and they must choose between the tidal pull of old dreams and the future’s wide unknown.
Walter Bennett’s characters and craftsmanship will remind readers of Kent Haruf and Richard Russo.
“… authentic voices, skillful weaving of plot…. Simply put, Bennett is a master storyteller.”
- Susan Wilson, Southern Literary Review
Leaving Tuscaloosa
Imagine Alabama, the sultry summer of 1962--the year before Bull Connor turned his fire hoses on civil rights protesters in Birmingham and the Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church. Two young men, one black, one white, stumble into their destinies as the world erupts beneath their feet. Richeboux Branscomb’s journey begins with a stupid mistake one night in a rattle-trap Ford on a dusty road. Acee Waites begins with a missing brother and a ruthless sheriff’s search party. Propelled along separate tracks through thirty-six hours of racial turmoil, these estranged boyhood friends encounter tenderness and cruelty, erotic passion and murderous rage. Then amid the spreading fires of racial violence, their paths converge in a terrible, riveting climax. This stunning debut novel from Southern-based writer Walter Bennett, LEAVING TUSCALOOSA, weaves in elegant prose the life-threads of two men segregated by race but alike in their familiarity with aspiration blunted by loss. The work was a 2010 Finalist for the Bellwether Prize, a nation-wide competition founded and administered by Barbara Kingsolver for unpublished narratives that address issues of social change.
Chapel Hill Magazine calls Leaving Tuscaloosa a “stunning debut novel.”
“…a book which every member of the legal profession, every law school teacher, every law student, and every entering law student should read.”
- G. S. Crihfield, The North Carolina State Bar Journal
Lawyers today are in a moral crisis. The popular perception of the lawyer, both within the legal community and beyond, is no longer the Abe Lincoln of American mythology, but is often a greedy, cynical manipulator of access and power. In The Lawyer's Myth, Walter Bennett goes beyond the caricatures to explore the deeper causes of why lawyers are losing their profession and what it will take to bring it back.
“Walter Bennett is an extraordinarily gifted scholar and storyteller. The Lawyer’s Myth is an eloquent, compelling and compassionate call to action for the legal profession to live up to its highest ideals,” says Deborah L. Rhode, Ernest L. McFarland Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and Director of the Stanford Center on the Legal Profession, about this work.