The Handywoman Stories (review)

planning models in an attempt to ward off unwanted development stimulated by their national park neighbors. Howell's anthology together with Chris Bolgiano's The Appalachian Forest: A Searchfor Roots and Renewal (1998) and DonDavis's Where There are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians (2000) present new ways of thinking about the Appalachian landscape. Given the seriousness of our present environmental crisis we must hope that others build upon their work. Howell and her fellow authors convincingly demonstrate the contributions that cultural science research can make to resolving environmental problems. It remains to be seen whether the will exists to implement them. —H. Tyler Blethen Coberly, Lenore McComas. The Handywoman Stories. Athens: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2002. 155 pages. Hardcover $28.95. Paper $16.95. If we were local folks sitting out front of a general store in Lincoln County, West Virginia, it'd be easy to tell you who Lenore McComas Coberly is. She's a McComas who grew up mostly in the county seat, Hamlin, but who spent her summers with relatives in the remote Big 86 Ugly region (where time stood still even after the New Deal's WPA tried to put a road in there—creating the subject of one these stories). Lenore went to high school in Hamlin, to West Virginia University and eventually married an engineer. She spent a good deal of her life in Indonesia, China, and the Philippines. But she remembered Lincoln County and went back there with her family whenever she could. And she started writing stories set there. Lenore's stories don't go back as far as 1800, but that was when McComases were the firstpeople to settle in Lincoln County's Mud River Valley. The McComases have always represented high standards there, so it figures that Lenore's stories attain high writing standards—and it also figures that they depict high personal standards of loyalty, tolerance, and generosity. Those values pervade the choices that Lenore's characters make—excluding the choices made by the bad 'uns, of course. Some of these stories are based on fact. For instance, Chuck Yaeger really did buzz Hamlin (his home town) during World War II and send its civil-defense volunteers running for cover. Lenore treats that lightheartedly —in sharp contrast with the next story, the longest one in the book and also the best. It's called "Early Transparent" and Lenore tells it from four participants' very different perspectives—last of all through the eyes of the young wife and mother who faces a deep choice when she learns in 1945 that her high school sweetheart, officially dead according to the Red Cross, instead had survived the Bataan Death March and had just been found in bad condition in a Japanese POW camp. When I went to Lincoln County in 1971, I was among the newcomers who some of Lenore's stories are about. I ran out of economic options and had to leave. That's why it's so good again to hear a calm McComas voice distilling common sense. —Paul Salstrom Zuber, Isabel. Salt. New York: Picador USA, 2002. 352 pages. Hardcover $25.00. In the introduction to her book of poems, Winter's Exile, Isabel Zuber says, "By drawing these poems together like this, I hope they will also honor a lostway oflife that, while itwas rockhard and oftenpainful, was also beautiful, moving, and satisfying in a way that we may not be able to recover." It seems that in her first novel, Salt, she wished to do the same. Her protagonist, Anna Maude Stockton, lives at the turn of the 87 ...