We All Hear Voices

By Sam Taggart

Albert Lawrence Moon is a small-town guy with big-time dreams that never quite materialize. His only real asset is Moon's Bar and Grill in Gum Ridge, Arkansas. Even that business is struggling despite... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 144010848X
• ISBN13: 9781440108488
• Release Date: April 2009
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Length: 220 Pages
• Weight: 2.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Butterscotch Memories--We All Hear Voices

I picked up We All Hear Voices by Sam Taggart mainly because I knew Sam Taggart when I was in junior high. I really did not expect to experience such a warm feeling for a book by a local author. I was most pleasantly surprised. Jack, the main character, with his strange affliction, captured my heart. I have enjoyed this book so much that I have given it as gifts many times. Thus far, I have only heard praise from those who received it. I look forward to Sam's next book.

We All Hear Voices--But Do We Listen?

Our friend Jack suffers mental illnesses that perhaps stem partly from emotional trauma so severe that his mind has tucked the horrors away into the deepest recesses of his fractured and forgotten memories. With more than a little help from his friends, namely the buoyant Mary Ann, along with various good Samaritans, Jack's seemingly aimless wandering lead him back to rural Arkansas, where a wise gypsy woman slowly but surely pieces together the jigsaw-puzzle of details that explain Jack's life's journey and, at the same time, puts to rest a long-standing mystery that over a number of years had accumulated lofty layers of beguiling intrigue. Dr. Sam Taggart has created a world where the meek truly do inherit the earth--or just a piece of it, anyway. "We All Hear Voices" is, for the most part, set in my home state of Arkansas. Other key settings, such as the Memphis area, are stomping grounds that I, too, once called home, even down to the stock car racetrack that roared with thrills and excitement every Saturday night. While the racetrack in my hometown was just a stone's throw from my childhood domicile, the "Empire Stock Car and Drag Strips" track in a imagined version of Gum Ridge, Arkansas, draws famished patrons across the road to Moon's Bar and Grill, owned by Mr. Albert Lawrence Moon--a man whose livelihood is in part dependent upon Jack, the establishment's innately gifted cook. Jack can cook because he explains, "He can eat." As long as life is relatively secure, Jack successfully channels his ever-present synesthesia, a neurological phenomenon that allows Jack to associate smells and tastes with colors, shapes and heightened emotional responses. Jack magically combines freshly cooked vegetables or succulently grilled meats with seasonings and spices that satiate the appetites of scores of customers, who in turn, fatten the pockets of "Moon," who readers eventually realize is Gum Ridge's real "lunatic" due to his inability or refusal to yield to those guiding voices we all hear, if we just listen. Taggart delivers brilliant descriptions of the mid-South and the hardworking folks who either eke out their living farming the land or toil as laborers to churn the cogs of meager commerce that support small Delta towns buffered by verdant soybean and cotton fields. Some of the novel's colorful characters bear names of actual people I know. Taggart's "We All Hear Voices" piqued my interest initially because I had heard that his novel was set in Arkansas. Dr. Taggart, whom I truly respect as a physician, is a congenial, down-to-earth man who never fails to acknowledge passersby with a friendly wave while he's out jogging here, there and seemingly everywhere in the central-Arkansas city of Benton, where he practices medicine. However, Taggart has proven himself a deft and persuasive storyteller. I earnestly rooted for the story's flawed but redeemable characters, all of whom seemed to battle baggage from their sordid pasts. In the little town