New Book Notes

Chad Arthur. Break Away. Mustang, Okla.: Tate Publishing & Enterprises, 2009. 285 pages with illustrations. Trade paperback, $21.99.

The title page contains the statement: “Tate Publishing … reflects the philosophy established by the founders, based on Psalm 68:11.” This book is a novel about a sixteen-year-old urban basketball player who gains release from a juvenile detention center by moving to live with his rural West Virginia grandfather. The author lives in Buffalo, West Virginia.

James Alex Baggett. Homegrown Yankees: Tennessee’s Union Cavalry in the Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. 444 pages with 8 maps, 14 portraits, epilogue, appendix, and index. Hardback with dust jacket, $45.00.

Fourteen mounted regiments and eight local units fighting for the Union were made up of loyal Tennesseeans, most from East Tennessee. This is the first book-length treatment of these units and their contribution to the war effort. The author is a retired dean and history professor from Union University in West Tennessee.

Randy Ball and Rodney Ferrell. Then & Now: Rogersville. Charleston, W. Va.: Arcadia Publishing, 2009. 95 pages with photos, Trade paperback, $21.99.

Randy Ball, a life-long Rogersville resident, is a very creative photographer whose work we featured in our Spring 2008 issue. Rodney Ferrell is the official historian of Hawkins County, which Rogersville serves as the county seat. The photographs that open each of the four chapters are more creative than the rest.

KB Ballentine. Fragments of Light. Knoxville: Celtic Cat Publishing, 2009. 84 pages. Trade paperback, $15.00.

The author is a high school English teacher in East Tennessee. “KB Ballentine’s poems display a painter’s sense of the ever-shifting, never-the-same light as it reveals, caresses, sometimes stuns. . . . And not to be missed are the seasons of the moon, surely some of the best poems in Fragments of Light. – Jeff Daniel Marion.

Helen Margaret Bassitt. Rumors of War. South Charleston, W. Va.: Evergreen Syndicate, 2010. 269 pages with photos and end notes. Trade paperback, $19.95.

This is the second volume of the author’s Kanawha Chronicles. It tells the stories of the men of the Kanawha River Valley in Central West Virginia who were involved in the wars of their times, from the Revolutionary War through World War II.

Helen Margaret Bassitt. Tales from Coalsmouth. South Charleston, W. Va.: Evergreen Syndicate, 2009. 220 pages with photos, a bibliography and an appendix. Trade paperback. $19.95

This is the first volume of the author’s Kanawha Chronicles. It tells the story of St. Albans, West Virginia, first named Coalsmouth.

Grant F. Begley. Hewn from the Rock. Lexington, Ky.: The Clark Group, 2009. 179 pages. Trade paperback, $16.95.

The Epigram of this biography is from Isaiah, “Look to the rock from which you were hewn.” It is appropriate both for the subject of the book, John D. Begley, a Leslie County, Kentucky, educator, and his son, the author, Grant F. Begley, a physician. It works, too, for Grant’s mother, Myrtle Jones Begley, also an educator, and his brother, Philip, who practiced medicine in Harlan, Kentucky. “Hewn from the Rock is an eloquent, sensitive, and honest mental map of what once was in Eastern Kentucky.” – Chad Berry.

James Samuel Brill. The Store: Memories of the Peoples Store and Supply. Parsons, W. Va.: McClain Printing Company, 2009. 56 pages with photos and other illustrations. Trade paperback, $5.00.

The author, Sam Brill, grew up in an apartment above the Peoples Store and Supply in Marlinton, West Virginia. This old-fashioned general store, founded in 1915, closed in the mid-1980s.

Thomas Burton. Beech Mountain Man: The Memoirs of Ronda Lee Hicks. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009. 133 pages with index, photos, and an introduction by John Shelton Reed. Hardback with dust jacket, $32.95.

Thomas Burton is professor emeritus of English at East Tennessee State University and a pioneer in the sensitive portrayal of mountain folk culture. This book captures the life story of a man who exemplifies the sometimes violent under class of mountain culture.

Kenneth Butcher. The Middle of the Air. Winston-Salem: John F. Blair, 2009...