Booklist and Notes

Booklist and Notes George Brosi Chappell, Fred. Family Gathering: Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. 62 pages. Hardback in dust jacket. $22.50. Trade paperback. $14.95. Fred Chappell (b. 1936) is one of the most prolific, popular and prized contemporary Appalachian authors, a native of Canton, North Carolina, now semi-retired from a long and illustrious career at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Of his many volumes of poetry, this is perhaps both his most accessible and most enjoyable. Here the poet offers uninhibited vignettes of members of an extended family emphasizing their most laughable and interesting characteristics . Portraits include Cousin Lena who is "eager to fight/With nail and tooth/ Our flabby images of untruth . . . her fingernails in various hues /Of pretended harlotry,/Are manifestos meant to address/And put to exquisite duress/Her misguided family." "Uncle Lewis toils from set to set,/From chair to chair,/Following the track of Aunt Nanette,/Soothing feelings here and there,/Begging us please to forgive, please to forget." "Cousin Lola charts her paramours/On a performance scale from One to Ten/And then announces publicly the scores." "Light verse seldom comes much better than these snapshots in rhyme." - Booklist. Cunningham, Mia. Anna Hubbard: Out ofthe Shadows. Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 2001. 234 pages with photos, recipes, a chronology, a family tree, a bibliography, an index, and a list of books read by the subject. Hardback in dust jacket. $29.95. Anna Eikenhout Hubbard (1902-1986) and her husband, Harlan Hubbard (1900-1988) were well-known "back to the land" practitioners in Kentucky. From 1952 until her death in 1986—except for a few months in their later years when they were receiving medical treatments—the Hubbards lived in a small home they built themselves in Trimble County which was accessible primarily from the Ohio River. They didn't hold jobs. Instead they fished and gardened and hunted for most of their sustenance, and Harlan sold paintings and wrote some autobiographical books. They also enjoyed a steady income from renting out a house that Harlan had inherited. The author of this biography lived in that house as a child and visited and corresponded 93 with the subject of this book throughout her life. "Cunningham peels back the layers of Anna's life—first the biographical facts, then her roles as homemaker and wife to Harlan, and finally her private, secret life, her hidden heart."—Wade Hall. "What is exciting is Cunningham's vivid, painterly prose—a writing style that transcends the mere facts of Hubbard's life to explore more salient truths."—L. Elisabeth Beattie in the Lexington Herald-Leader. Mia Cunningham (b. 1943) lives with her husband in Fairfax County, Virginia. Deutermann, P. T. Hunting Season. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001. 402 pages. Hardback in dust jacket. $24.95. In this fast-paced novel almost all the characters are both hunting and hunted, especially the protagonist, Edwin Kreiss, previously trained by the government as a "sweeper" to seek out rogue agents, but now retired. He is committed to solving the mystery of the disappearance of his daughter and two male friends from a hiking trip in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia. The FBI has sent its own sweeper, Janet Carter, to find him, and both are hunted by the kidnapper who lurks near an Army Depot modeled after the Radford Army Ammunition Plant plotting to revenge his son's death at Waco. Peter Thomas Deutermann (b. 1941) is a Naval Academy graduate and a retired Navy Captain with nineteen military decorations who worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He lives on a Georgia farm. This is his fourth novel. Ellis, Jack D. Morehead Memories: True Stories from Eastern Kentucky. Ashland: The Jesse Stuart Foundation, 2001. 577 pages with photos, appendix, and bibliography. This compilation of the author's newspaper columns on local history emphasizes the role of churches and schools, businesses and banks. Jack Ellis (b. 1927) is a retired librarian and minister who still lives in Morehead. Flynn, Keith. The Lost Sea: Poems. Oak Ridge: The Iris Press, 2000. 112 pages. Trade paperback. $13.00. Keith Flynn's primary claim...