Poplar Street

Poplar Street is a lively book about growing up in a multi-generational Catholic household in the mid-century American South. Raised in a family whose ancestors helped settle Memphis, Tennessee, Adrienne Adler Downs and Michele Adler share stories about a father who needed adult supervision, a take-no-prisoners grandmother who cheerfully admitted she married for the money, and a raucous celebration that resulted in their Poplar Street house being unofficially blacklisted by the officials of a local men's college. Through it all was a stoic grandfather, a Rosary-praying mother, a ghost or two, a host of convivial cousins, and a Grand-Central-Station atmosphere that kept the whole family in a state of high alert. "The mystery of family bonds can never be understood, only appreciated," the authors write in Poplar Street's preface. Readers will say the same thing about the book.