Ash Grove
Ash Grove

Author: Wanda Fries

Publisher:

Published: 2012-06-29

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9780615626192

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Deana Perry, the daughter of a coal miner, and Will Brinson, the son of a wealthy coal operator, have tried to leave the shadows of their powerful fathers and the painful secrets of Ash Grove, Kentucky, far behind them. But now Cleave Brinson is dead and Wayman Perry is dying. Will, who wonders if his father was capable of murder, finds himself drawn back to Ash Grove determined to unravel the mystery of his mother's death. Deana has managed to build a life for herself and her daughter Sophie. But when she returns to Ash Grove, will their fragile happiness be able to survive the truth? Lee Smith writes, "Wanda Fries goes straight for the heart in Ash Grove, a story of lost love and terrible secrets in an Appalachian mining town. Both gritty and poetic, real and transcendent, Ash Grove is a literary page-turner, heralding a major new talent. Wanda Fries writes from deep within the contemporary culture of Appalachia, and she gets it all just exactly right." From New Southerner, in a review by Christina Lovin--"A tale spun out as if from a reel of dynamite fuse, Fries' Ash Grove winds a precarious, rocky way through darkness, back into the light. Like the mine shafts that pierce the peaks around Ash Grove, through the deft storytelling of the author, the plots twist and turn, narrowing into blackness and dead ends. Characters disappear around corners, and then reappear as suddenly as a coal train around a hairpin bend. A delicious delving into the stony black heart of a town and its long-held secrets, Ash Grove provides that rollercoaster feeling one has on a fast ride along a mountain two-lane: frightening, exhilarating, but in the end, awfully satisfying." Silas House--"Ash Grove is a beautiful novel."

Ozark Baptizings, Hangings, and Other Diversions
Ozark Baptizings, Hangings, and Other Diversions

Author: Robert K. Gilmore

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 1990-01-01

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 9780806122700

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Ozark Baptizings, Hangings, and Other Diversions is about the people of a unique corner of America and how they entertained themselves at the turn of the century. In the years from 1885 to 1910 most Ozark communities were still relatively isolated from the outside and from each other. Thus they had to rely on their own resources for diversion from the difficult and often solitary business of everyday living. The most popular of their entertainments were those that brought some "theater" into their lives. They especially delighted in "literaries," debates, mock trials, closing-of-school programs, suppers, picnics, brush-arbor revivals, and baptizings. Then there was the occasional hanging that for audience attention was rivaled only by the political rally. The hanging took on all the flavor of high drama, even to the impassioned farewell address by the condemned, who was carried away by the excitement of it all. By their entertainments shall we know them, and this account of Ozarkers' diversions reveals them in all their independence, conservatism, sense of place, humor, dedication to learning, love of the spoken language, and religious and political intensity. No "come-here" (an Ozarker's term for a newcomer), Robert K. Gilmore grew up on an Ozark farm, reared by grandparents who were young in the era described in this book. Years later he went back to the rural Ozarks and encouraged the people to recall the early days for him. They described the entertainments of their youth with a special clarity of recall. The files of the Ozark weeklies also proved richly rewarding. The editors and their rural "correspondents" delighted in describing the local entertainments in vivid reportage loaded with editorial comment. This book, illustrated with rare photographs of turn-of-the-century diversions celebrates the centennial of an era.

Land of Big Rivers
Land of Big Rivers

Author: M. J. Morgan

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 2010-07-06

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0809385643

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Drawing on research from a variety of academic fields, such as archaeology, history, botany, ecology, and physical science, M. J. Morgan explores the intersection of people and the environment in early eighteenth-century Illinois Country—a stretch of fecund, alluvial river plain along the Mississippi river. Arguing against the traditional narrative that describes Illinois as an untouched wilderness until the influx of American settlers, Morgan illustrates how the story began much earlier. She focuses her study on early French and Indian communities, and later on the British, nestled within the tripartite environment of floodplain, riverine cliffs and bluffs, and open, upland till plain/prairie and examines the impact of these diverse groups of people on the ecological landscape. By placing human lives within the natural setting of the period—the abundant streams and creeks, the prairies, plants and wildlife—she traces the environmental change that unfolded across almost a century. She describes how it was a land in motion; how the occupying peoples used, extracted, and extirpated its resources while simultaneously introducing new species; and how the flux and flow of life mirrored the movement of the rivers. Morgan emphasizes the importance of population sequences, the relationship between the aboriginals and the Europeans, the shared use of resources, and the effects of each on the habitat. Land of Big Rivers is a unique, many-themed account of the big-picture ecological change that occurred during the early history of the Illinois Country. It is the first book to consider the environmental aspects of the Illinois Indian experience and to reconsider the role of the French and British in environmental change in the mid-Mississippi Valley. It engagingly recreates presettlement Illinois with a remarkable interdisciplinary approach and provides new details that will encourage understanding of the interaction between physical geography and the plants, animals, and people in the Illinois Country. Furthermore, it exhibits the importance of looking at the past in the context of environmental transformation, which is especially relevant in light of today’s global climate change.

Set the Night on Fire
Set the Night on Fire

Author: Mike Davis

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2021-04-13

Total Pages: 809

ISBN-13: 1839761229

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Los Angeles Times Bestseller This riveting tour through 1960s Los Angeles is a “history from below, in the very best sense” as it celebrates the “grassroots heroes and struggles” of the social movements of the era (Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Natural Causes). “Authoritative and impressive.” —Los Angeles Times “Monumental.” —Guardian Los Angeles in the sixties was a hotbed of political and social upheaval. The city was a launchpad for Black Power—where Malcolm X and Angela Davis first came to prominence and the Watts uprising shook the nation. The city was home to the Chicano Blowouts and Chicano Moratorium, as well as being the birthplace of “Asian American” as a political identity. It was a locus of the antiwar movement, gay liberation movement, and women’s movement, and, of course, the capital of California counterculture. Mike Davis and Jon Wiener provide the first comprehensive movement history of L.A. in the sixties, drawing on extensive archival research and dozens of interviews with principal figures, as well as the authors’ storied personal histories as activists. Following on from Davis’s award-winning L.A. history, City of Quartz, Set the Night on Fire is a historical tour de force, delivered in scintillating and fiercely beautiful prose.