This amusing little story has no delusions of grandeur, no intellectual pretensions, but it certainly has a good sense of timing; the advance author copy was received for approval the very day there was a long-awaited public announcement of several verified and videotaped sightings of an Ivorywill Woodpecker in heavily wooded areas of Arkansas. Like life seen through the romantic distortions of wavy handblown glass windowpanes, this story is a blurring and blending of fact and fiction. But then so is all of life in the South, where the only thing certain is that the real fact is a whole lot stranger and more interesting than any fiction. The late Dr. Carmichael's stout-hearted friends really did forget exactly where they buried him after celebrating his life by drinking all the bottles of fine vintage wine in his underground wine cellar, which led to all sorts of complications. From the Kemper Brothers Rebellion complete with ears whacked off and pickled in wine to the rowdy raucous Black Cat saloon, there's a lot of truth in this book. As for the major characters, with the exception of the late lamented Dr. Carmichael, they're all simply fictional, with no resemblance intended to reality. They're just as unreal as that old Lord God Bird, the Ivorybill Woodpecker. Which may not be all that unreal at all.