With 126 color photographs and 30 quotes from noted Alabama storytellers, Robin McDonald creates the "mood" of small towns everywhere as they quietly retire from service.
Heart of a Small Town is Robin McDonald’s paean to a time when small rural communities all over this country bustled with life. Concentrating on Alabama, he draws his subjects from those areas of the state that have been bypassed by major highways and left somewhat deserted. Places like Verbena, Mentone, Burnt Corn, Newbern, Epes, and Enterprise; places in the Black Belt, in Wiregrass Country, in the Piedmont. There he records common objects—screen doors, broken sidewalks, storefront displays, neon signs, rusting pickup trucks, kudzu-covered walls, and church windows—with an uncommon sensitivity.
Matched with quotations from writing that grew out of these places, the images take on an unusually vibrant life. Robin McDonald's photographs are animated and enriched by the lyrical quotations borrowed from southern writers, some less well known, like Augusta Evans Wilson and Viola Goode Liddell, and some well known, like Truman Capote, Zelda Fitzgerald, James Agee, Vicki Covington, and Rick Bragg. They echo with the hopes and joys and the struggles and grief of folks who have called these places home.

Heart of A Small Town: Photographs of Alabama Towns

Arts & Photography

McDonald, Robin

Photography & Video

University Alabama Press

In Visions of the Black Belt, Robin McDonald and Valerie Pope Burnes offer a richly illustrated tour of the Black Belt, the fertile arc that represents the cultural efflorescence of Alabama’s heartland. Like knowledgeable friends, McDonald and Burnes guide readers through the Black Belt’s towns and architecture and introduce the region’s great panoply of citizens, farmers, craftspeople, cooks, writers, and musicians. A constellation of Black Belt towns arose during Alabama’s territorial decades, communities like Selma, Camden, Eutaw, Tuskegee, Greenville, and many more. Visions of the Black Belt recounts their stories and others, such as Demopolis’s founding by exiles from Napoleon’s France. As an escarpment of clouds scuds across an indigo sky, the ruins of Alabama’s lost capital of Cahaba reveal the secrets of its lost squares. Also on this picturesque tour are the Black Belt’s homes, from artless cabins wreathed in fern to ozymandian manses wrapped by stately columns, such as Kirkwood and Reverie. Among the emblematic houses of worship lovingly photographed in Visions of the Black Belt is Prairieville’s St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, noted for its “carpenter gothic” style. Also reflecting the region’s history of faith are poignant graveyards such as Greenville’s Pioneer Cemetery with its homespun memorials of seashell-and-concrete and the elegant marbles clad in ebon lichen of Selma's Live Oak Cemetery. In photos and text, McDonald and Burnes bring to life the layers of history that shaped the Black Belt’s tastes, sounds, and colors. Their gastronomic discoveries include the picant crawfish of the Faunsdale Bar &amp; Grill and GainesRidge Dining Club’s famed Black Bottom pie. They bring the sounds of the Black Belt to life by presenting a wide range of musicians and musical events, from bona fide blues and soul masters to Eutaw’s Black Belt Roots Festival. Including two maps and more than 370 full-color photographs, Visions of the Black Belt offers a timeless message of faith, determination, and the rich simplicity of living in harmony with the rhythms of the land and nature. Published in Cooperation with the Black Belt Treasures Cultural Arts Center, Camden, Alabama

Visions of the Black Belt: A Cultural Survey of the Heart of Alabama

Burnes, Valerie Pope

Black Widow

The spellbinding true story of obsession and power, of money and arsenic, of multiple personas and multiple murders: of the ghastly web that Audrey Marie Hilley wove around her family to obtain material security and the social prestige she imagined it brought - a story which culminated in one of the nation's most sensational murder trials. Written by the reporter who covered the trial and became the confidante of the Hilley family.

Biographies & Memoirs

True Crime

New Horizon Press

The spellbinding true story of obsession and power, of money and arsenic, of multiple personas and multiple murders: of the ghastly web that Audrey Marie Hilley wove around her family to obtain material security and the social prestige she imagined it brought - a story which culminated in one of the nation's most sensational murder trials. Written by the reporter who covered the trial and became the confidante of the Hilley family.

Growing Up in St. Augustine, Trinidad, W.I.\nThis charming book is part three in a series of memoirs of the McDonald family of Trinidad, after "Beloved" and "Archie". 
Here, Thelma's and Archie's daughter Robin digs deep into her treasured childhood where she brings to vibrant life a loving family of many interests whose days were filled with fascinating encounters and experiences of a time gone-by enjoyed to the full with friends, neighbours and people you just met. One gets a lively glimpse of the joys and sadnesses, the tests and tribulations, trials and triumphs which in those days were so much more person-to-person lived than they are in this age of electronic relationships. Here she reconstructs the neighbourhood of St. Augustine during the 40s and 50s - creating a pictorial map as your guide. The book is also interspersed with some of her brother Ian McDonald's vivid and heartfelt poems. 
So join Robin in her re-discovery of a microcosm in time and place that has all but disappeared.

Carmody Road: Memoir of Growing Up in St. Augustine, Trinidad, W.I.

Community & Culture

Paria Publishing Company Ltd.

Good Deeds Fill Needs - Meet Amazing Grace

Children's Books

Literature & Fiction

Independently published

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by McDonald, Robin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by McDonald, Robin