SOURCE: A review of Whistling in the Dark, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 239, No. 22, May 11, 1992, p. 64.

In the following brief review, the critic provides a favorable assessment of Whistling in the Dark.

Much is enjoyable and uplifting in this farrago of memoir, fable, poem and essay, most of which previously appeared in such journals as Kenyon Review and Virginia Quarterly Review. [In Whistling in the Dark] Garrett, author of novels, poetry, short fiction, biography and criticism, strides down the paths his narratives take him with careful, assertive writing. In the reflective pieces, he often allows himself the heroic poise of inspirational rhetoric. As he tells of wartime experience and legacy, the noble character of his tribe (be it defined as blood relatives or Anglo-American white men), the two one-eyed (literally) coaches from his days at the Sewanee Military Academy and Princeton, or anecdotes from other halcyon days of academe...