Booklist and Notes

Booklist and Notes George Brosi Adams, Shelby Lee. Appalachian Legacy. Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 1998. 130 pages, most photographic plates by the author. Hardback in dust jacket $50.00. Trade paperback. $30. The author's autobiographical essay and his explanation of his rationale for creating this disturbing book are both interesting. Adams claims he is interested in the last remnants of traditional mountain people, but he has chosen for this book a number of traditional people who have physical and mental abnormalities. They appear grotesque the wayAdamshas configured the pictures. Despite the title and the fact that several of the pictures here are outstanding, this is not a book about Appalachia. Too much of it serves to reinforce the worst stereotypes of the region as a whole. As part of a larger collection of regional photography, this book may serve an artistic or sociological purpose. However, it will never do as a single representative volume. Adams grew up spending summers and his high school years in rural Letcher County, Kentucky, where his parents were raised on adjoining farms. Adams currently teaches photography at a college in Massachusetts. Dann, Jack. The Silent. New York: Bantam Books, 1998. 279 pages. Hardback in dust jacket. $23.95. This novel is told as a first-person account of the Civil War as seen through the eyes of Mundy McDowell, a twelve-year-old who was so traumatized by the killing of his Shenandoah Valley family by Federal soldiers that he was struck dumb and never talked again. Instead he told his story in this book. The horrors and even the occasional humor of the war are thus seen from the wide-open and unsentimental eyes of a mere child. "A ferocious portrait of the Civil War's human toll . . . Dann captures, in a way few other novelists have, the sheer bloody chaos of battle in the Civil War . . . Dann's anger, and his portrait of combat's sheer horrors, make for a vivid and disturbing read." -Kirkus Reviews. "This is narrative storytelling at its best-so highly charged emotionally as to constitute a kind of poetry from hell. Most emphatically recommended." -Library Journal. Jack Dann lives in New George Brosi operates an online bookstore in Berea: www.appalachianbooks .com 71 York and Australia. He is the author of The Memory Cathedral, an international best-seller. Barbara R. Duncan, editor and collector. Living Stories of the Cherokee. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 253 pages with photos, index and bibliography. Hardback in dust jacket. $29.95. Trade paperback. $15.95. This important collection contains seventy-one stories from six contemporary members of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee who are active story-tellers. It gives excellent background information on each and presents the stories in an innovative way, ending each line where the teller put the emphasis so that the pages almost look like they contain verse. The result is a very authentic grassroots telling of the stories. They read like contemporary Cherokee sound when telling traditional stories to their children and grandchildren, not like scholars retelling stories and cleaning them up to conform to their biases. The stories vary from traditional folktales to topical recollections of public events to family lore utilizing a variety of sources. This is a truly significant contribution to the field of Cherokee lore. Before this book came out, most books of Cherokee stories were simply retellings of some of the favored stories found in The Myths of the Cherokee by James Mooney, who transcribed them from his informant, Swimmer, at the turn of the century. At a time when some people with tenuous claims to Cherokee ancestry and virtually no connections to life as it is lived in Cherokee, North Carolina, offer themselves as "experts," this book, which was created with permission of the Tribal Council and contains only stories of people who have lived in Cherokee, is particularly significant. Hollowell, Barbara G. Mountain Year: A Southern Appalachian Nature Notebook. Winston-Salem, N.C.: John F. Blair, Publisher, 1998. 290 pages with 60 color photographs and an index. Trade paperback $18.95. This is a delightful book that presents appealing little nature essays for each month...