Slow Dancing on Dinosaur Bones (review)

when it ripens, and what it's good for. If Old Southern Apples were published only for this catalogue, it would be an important book in pomology, for the author has lovingly and meticulously gathered information that must have taken him years to assemble and presented it in a highly accessible format. The list also includes an extensive index of apple names and synonyms as well as a list of the major nurseries that carry the various types of apples mentioned in Calhoun's book. The book is a must, of course, for owners of nurseries and orchards, but the work is so carefully prepared, written, and published that it's entertaining reading for anyone who likes apples in whatever form. —Marshall Myers Witt, Lana. Slow Dancing on Dinosaur Bones. New York: Scribner, 1996. 416 pages. Hardcover $22.00. Lana Witt's first novel can perhaps be described as a cross between Jesse Stuart's regional humor and Carmack McCarthy's macabre early novels, an entertaining tale packed chock-full of typically eccentric Eastern Kentuckians . Slow Dancing on Dinosaur Bones is fun to read. It's set somewhere near Hazard (or maybe Blackey), in a place where colorful local characters take on the corrupt banker, the Conroy Coal Company, and a demented murderer on the loose. Mystic, music-playing, hard-drinking, car-fixing, fish-catching Gilman Lee is the main character in a busy cast of off-the-wall ("larger than life", says Witt) Kentuckians who happily take in lost Californian Tom Jett, who seems to have fallen in from the pages ofDivine Right's Trip. Both Gilman and Tom help rescue Gemma Collet from her habit of sitting naked in a creek polluted by coal mining. Gemma has "turned white," all over, the effect of a disease called vitiligo, and has shunned all men for twelve years. She gets over it. But it's Gilman's old girl friend, Rosalie (a country singer who left Gilman for the local banker and left him in turn for Florida), who comes running home pursued by her lover turned killer, Frank Denton, who stirs this story. Throw in a devious coal company (maybe the icon of East Kentucky novels?) and lots of drinking and singing, and you've got Slow Dancing. For more color add in Gilman's best buddy (alive, that is) who is "Ten Fifteen," so named because his arms point to that time on the clock. 68 This book is rollicking good fun mixed with human misery and murder, bluegrass music and mythology, and a good dose of Robin Hood. I enjoy Witt's wording, and my favorite passage comes near the end of the book: "Outside, the creek stops gurgling, the wind goes to sleep, the birds close their mouths, and for a moment the whole world stops to let Gilman Lee step off." That's the way a larger-than-life hero ought to go out. Some of you won't like Slow Dancing on Dinosaur Bones for what you'll perceive as stereotype and degrading characterizations. This is not an Appalachian Studies text. If you read for fun, though, this book might be for you. —Garry Barker Conway, Cecelia. African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study ofFolk Traditions. Knoxville: University ofTennessee Press, 1995. 394 pages. Paperback $25.00. Scholarly arguments to demonstrate influence—whether of literary style and content or of the development of a practice in its cultural context— are inevitably complex. Cecelia Conway's book works in both areas, so one can anticipate the circuitous nature of the rhetorical threads. Couple this complexity with the passion Conway clearly feels for her thesis and material, and the result is a difficult but engaging study which attempts to prove the preeminence of the African tradition in the development of American banjo playing. This study consists of several subarguments which combine in support ofher thesis. In the process ofdemonstrating the African influence, Conway (1) presents and analyzes the written history (mostly in the form ofinstructional materials and brief literary or personal journal references) of the banjo in African-American traditions; (2) studies the impact of slaves' banjo playing on white professional entertainers, an "apprenticeship " that resulted in...