Newly Reprinted Books
MOUNTAIN FICTION
Novels
MOUNTAIN PEOPLE AND PLACES
Autobiographical Books
Biographies
APPALACHIAN CHILDREN'S AND YOUTH
BOOKS
Picture Books
First Woman and the
Strawberry: A Cherokee Legend retold by Gloria Dominic. Mahwah, New Jersey:
Troll, a 1998 reprint of a 1996 release. 48 pages illustrated by Charles Reasoner.
This is a delightful little book to read to
little children or for beginning readers. It presents a Cherokee legend about the
first two people, a man and a woman, and their first argument which concludes when the
Great Spirit provides a new fruit, strawberries, for first woman to help her get over her
anger and get in the mood to share. After the legend, some background on the Cherokee is
provided, illustrated with photographs. **Click
here to order**
Youth
Novels
Chasing
Redbird by Sharon Creech. New
York: Trophy/HarperCollins, 1997. 261 pages with a map.
Sharon Creech has established herself as one of
the premier contemporary authors of youth novels and one of the best ever with Ohio
River Valley settings. This youth novel shares a Northeastern Kentucky setting with
Sharon Creech's Newbery Award winner, Walk Two Moons (1994). Here
thirteen-year-old Zinnia Taylor finds an old wagon road near her family's farm and begins
to clear it, in the process discovering some significant family secrets. "Creech
again demonstrates her expertise at evoking physical and emotional landscapes and the
connections between the two as Zinny blazes her way down literal and spiritual
paths." - Deborah Stevenson, Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books.
"Creech crams her novel full of wonderful characters, proficient dialogue, bracing
descriptions and a merry use of language" - Kirkus Reviews. **Click
here to order**
Novels
Foggy Mountain Breakdown by Sharyn McCrumb. New York: Ballantine, 1997.
340 pages.
This is the first short story collection from
the author of fourteen successful novels. She has won all five of the major awards
in crime fiction. "A literary as well as a mystery event . . . These twenty-four
stories take place, for the most part, in Sharyn McCrumb’s beloved Appalachia and
Scotland, and run the emotional gamut from laughter to sorrow. The tales are intriguing
and involving and will serve as a fine introduction to one of the world’s most
acclaimed authors." - Romantic Times. "McCrumb’s sassy humor, sharp
eye for human behavior, and respectful portrayal of American country are as strong here as
ever." - Detroit Free Press. **Click
here to order**
The Good Brother
by Chris Offutt. New York: Scribner/Simon and
Schuster, 1997. 317 pages.
Chris Offutt's emergence into the Appalachian
literary scene has been widely heralded and broadly enjoyed. His unique writing
style keeps readers on their toes and stimulated both on the surface and at deeper levels.
The protagonist of this novel is Virgil Caudill, a first name undoubtedly chosen as
a literary illusion to Dante's Interno where Virgil, the author of The Aeneid,
leads Dante on a tour of hell and purgatory. In The Good Brother, Virgil
Caudill takes his own tour when his everyday life as a garbage collector in a place very
much like Morehead, Kentucky, is shattered by the murder of his hell-raising brother.
Caudill satisfies the pressures to avenge this deed and commits his crime meticulously. He
successfully escapes to Montana physically free but terribly restrained by his
circumstances. There he slowly comes into contact with a militia type group, falls in
love, and inevitably is swept into a different but strangely similar breed of mountain
lawlessness. "Offutt is a fine writer . . . especially good in describing the hills
and inhabitants of Kentucky and capturing their voices . . . The Good Bother is a
complex book that captures rural voices, tells a compelling, contemporary story while
asking difficult questions about the nature of freedom and revenge" - David McLean.
This, the first novel by Chris Offutt (b. 1958), establishes him clearly as a literary
force to be reckoned with after his promising first book of stories, Kentucky Straight (1992),
and the memoir, The Same River Twice (1993). **Click
here to order**
Mason and Dixon by Thomas
Pynchon. New York: Owl/Henry Holt, 1997 . 773 pages.
Those who claim to have read, and especially to
have understood, Pynchon's books are often viewed with awe by other literary
affectionados. In 1974 Pynchon received the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow
, a novel of World War II England. Mason and Dixon is told in Pynchon's zany,
sometimes scatological, often profound, and always impressive but difficult way of
writing. Pynchon's use of nineteenth century language and syntax in Mason
and Dixon presents a totally new challenge, but the grand sweep of the book is more
straight forward than previous works. This lengthy tome centers around the
historical characters, Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) who
surveyed the line between Pennsylvania and Maryland. "Awash with light and charm,
rich with suggestion and idea, stuffed with the minutiae of another time and world, Mason
and Dixon is less a book to read through than to read in, to savor paragraph by
paragraph" - Paul Skenazy, San Francisco Chronicle. **Click
here to order**
A Virginia Yankee in the Civil
War:The Diaries of David Hunter Strother edited
with an Introduction by Cecil D. Eby, Jr. Chapel
Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, a 1989 reprint of a 1961 release. 294
pages with an index. Illustrated by the author.
David Hunter Strother (1816-1888) was a life-long resident of what is
now the Eastern West Virginia panhandle and, along with George Washington Harris of
Knoxville, Tennessee, the only native Southern Appalachian writer to be published by
national presses before the Civil War. He was an illustrator as well as a writer and
mostly wrote travel and local color pieces using the pen-name, "Porte Crayon."
In 1853 Harpers Magazine published his first story, about the Canaan
Valley of present-day West Virginia. He covered John Brown's famous Harper's Ferry
raid for Harpers and published two books after the War, Personal
Recollections of the War and The Mountains. This book consists of
Strother's Civil War Diaries. Each chapter is expertly put into context by the
editor, and all personal and place names and other possibly unknown references are
explained with footnotes which appear right on the pages where they are mentioned.
Strother was present at the Valley of Virginia Campaign , Cedar Mountain, Second Bull Run,
South Mountain, Antietam, Port Hudson, the Teche Campaign, New Market, and the Lynchburg
Raid. "An incomparable addition to any Civil War collection . . . Strother left
a personal record of the conflict both powerful and revealing--a 'must' book, really, if
you would know the true nature of this fratricidal struggle." - The New York
Times Book Review. **Click here to order**
Davy Crockett by Constance Rourke. Lincoln: The
University of Nebraska Press, a1998 edition of a 1934 release. 276 pages with a
bibliographical essay and a new introduction by Michael A. Lofaro, illustrated by James
MacDonald.
This book is truly a classic. Rourke artfully manages to bring
together both the facts and the legends of Davy Crockett (1786-1836) in a single
text by portraying Crockett responding to those who bait him with brags and folklore.
Her writing is so strong that sixty years of time never detract from its
immediacy. The importance of this biography is great because Crockett's legends were
perhaps the most important element in creating the first public images of the Southern
Mountaineer while his real-life career made him probably the first spokesperson for the
values and the politics which defined the early mountaineer."Rourke's style is a
delight . . . The Vividness of her descriptions and the beauty of her prose . . . cannot
help but increase [the reader's] literary appreciation and feeling for how a story should
be told." - The New York Times. **Click
here to order**
Reviews by George Brosi, Copyright 1998