SOURCE: "A Down-Home Twin Peaks," in The Observer, August 14, 1994, p. 16.

[In the following positive review, Cunningham argues that Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is as exuberant and entertaining as most fiction set in the American South.]

John Berendt's first book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, is American travel-writing at its fictional-factional best. It's a bowl-you-over, enthralled-appalled trawl in the magical depths of Savannah, Georgia, the prettiest surviving corner of the Old South.

An editor and columnist from New York, Berendt knew the Savannah mixture by repute—as most of us do. On the one hand, the lovely old squares and homes that General Sherman did not burn down in the Civil War, the town where the poet Conrad Aiken, a friend of T S Eliot's, is buried and Johnny ('Moon River') Mercer came from. On the other hand, the place where...