With the devil's help A true story of poverty, mental illness, and murder

Wooten's family is no different than others in wanting to keep their secrets. In this book, they mainly live in Sand Mountain, AL, but move around a bit. Journalist and comedian Wooten alternates between describing his own upbringing and life and depicting the family history from the perspective of his grandfather, known for a temper so hot, tales about it are legendary. Most around him consider his anger as something far more. Tracing five decades, the book showcases the difficulties of earning little to no income generation after generation, which meant living without running water and barely any electricity. Everything starts to crumble when crime comes into the picture, the grandfather's anger comes into play, and there's pushback against the law. This book is difficult to read at times. Many of the family memories are not happy ones; they're filled with violence and anger. There are also circumstances that will compel readers to empathize, sympathize, and root for the Wooten family. Note that the book contains derogatory classifications and descriptions. VERDICT Readers who are interested in complex family histories like Tara Westover's Educated will enjoy this book.--Leah Fitzgerald

Stand-up comic and writer Wooten turns in an earnest, sometimes sorrowful account of his upbringing in the poorest part of northeast Alabama. "I always imagined that centuries after humans no longer inhabit Earth, the planet will become a huge ball of kudzu drifting through space," writes Wooten, who grew up on a pig farm on a kudzu-choked rise called Sand Mountain. It had sand but also coal, enough to send a mining company to buy mineral rights--which, in the eyes of Wooten's father, amounted to free money, and "what could be better?" The author's father, he writes, was "an artist when it came to punishment," for whom "mercurial" scarcely begins to cover the ground. When his wife chided him for driving too fast, "Daddy" threw a brand-new fishing chair that his children bought him for Father's Day into the middle of a lake, and mom was soon nursing a black eye. The Wootens lived in a shack without insulation or siding, and they usually had no electricity "because the stingy people at the power company wanted a second payment." Daddy's uncertain mental condition and worrying visits by men in black suits lead young Wooten to explore the preceding generation, discovering that his grandfather had been imprisoned for murdering his own son-in-law, who admittedly cheated him on the proceeds of a potato harvest. Grandfather Wooten outsmarted the authorities, though, one day simply walking away from prison, never to be caught, "hiding in plain sight." The author celebrates the mountain as "a veritable Candyland filled with natural sweet-tooth appeasements" such as tree trunks full of wild honey, but it's a sad and depressing place for the most part, burdened with tragic history that, only in his 50s and too late to do anything about it, he decided was the product of unaddressed mental illness. A Drive-By Truckers album of a book, sometimes appalling, always heartfelt and vividly observed. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.