“Alabama is a better state and the University of Alabama Law School is an infinitely better place due to [Daniel Meador’s] stellar four years of splendid service,” a recent profile in the Alabama Lawyer‘s November 2012 issue concludes.

In reviewing Meador’s book The Transformative Years of the University of Alabama Law School: 1966-1970, University of Alabama alumnus Robert Potts’s examines Meador’s tenure at the law school and how Meador contributed to the school’s betterment.

Potts writes that after World War II, “the scholarly productivity coming from the law school as a whole was minimal,” with low admission standards, minimal diversity, and not much participation in law organizations by students or staff. Meador had graduated from the University of Alabama, and he agreed to return in 1966 as dean of the law school to help right the school. Potts relates that Meador “brought with him a vision for greatness that elevated the hopes and aspirations of its existing students, many of the faculty and, especially, the alumni of the school. Nevertheless, he encountered significant obstacles as he sought to implement his reforms.”

Meador describes the high and low points of his work to reform the school in Transformative Years. He successfully raised the law school’s standards, increased the enrollment of African American students, created new fundraising opportunities for the school, and helped the law library be designated as a U.S. Government Depository.

Though Meador left the school in 1970 after clashing with the incoming administration, Potts and others credit Meador with the law school’s turnaround. “Those of us who were fortunate enough to study at his feet and to be imbued with his grand vision for the law school, lawyer-leaders and the legal profession,” Potts writes, “have profited immensely for his having passed our way.”

Read the full article from Alabama Lawyer.

The Transformative Years of the University of Alabama Law School is available from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite bookstore.

Joe Samuel Starnes’s new novel Fall Line rang in the new year with an honor from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The newspaper included Fall Line among their “best books of the South” list for 2012.

Fall Line, based on a true story, follows the residents of a rural Georgia town as they deal with the flooding of their town by a man-made government dam.

“[In Fall Line], Starnes rips the lid off dirty Georgia politics, skewers the haves and honors the have-nothings who pushed back when a manmade lake came along to drown their communities for electricity and big profits,” writes Gina Webb for the Journal-Constitution. “Nothing says Southern like a bunch of corrupt good ol’ boys sitting around a table gambling away the lives of poor people.”

The October 2012 volume of Studies in American Culture also reviewed Fall Line. Jean Cash of James Madison University praised Fall Line as “a novel worthy of attention, providing real insight into how the power of money and government contributed to the loss of the agrarian South. … Starnes knows his home are and its people and how write about them with admirable authority and poetic understanding.”

In the article “Southern books offer varying points of view,” Todd South of the Chattanooga Times Free Press recommended Fall Line as well, writing that “the cast of characters are rich with color both in word and deed [and] he prose reads smooth and clean but still serves up layers of texture in scene and style.”

Fall Line is available in hardcover and ebook from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite bookstore.