Burning the Furniture, Dan Smith’s third book, is an off-beat creative memoir of growing up in the Old South in a large family amid poverty, alcoholism, racism and the very real joys of being a boy at a time when creative play was an activity and not a psychologist’s directive. It is a story of the newspaper business at a time of great change in a country that was occasionally on the verge of tearing itself apart in war and of social evolution. It is a work full of compassion, humor, pain and challenge by a writer able to look inside his own physical and psychological environment from a safe distance. Dan Smith’s journey into and beyond active alcoholism is a story of redemption that is often almost physically painful and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny.