Home and Away: A Professor's Journal by James Duane Bolin (review)

Since 2005, Duane Bolin, Kentucky historian at Murray State University, has been writing weekly essays for the local Murray Ledger and Times, in a column titled "Home and Away." His highly personal "snippets from a life well led" (in the words of Louisville Courier-Journal outdoors writer Gary Garth) have also appeared in the author's home Webster County papers, as well as the Danville (Ky.) Advocate-Messenger and the Kentucky Gazette. A number of the essays have been selected and organized thematically for Home and Away: A Professor's Journal into chapters on family, home in Murray, his travels, "calling," and life. For historians and other academicians, there are also chapters on teaching, learning, history, and writing.

The author describes himself as "classically trained" in the art of Kentucky politics, having observed as a young boy how the game was played in his home western Kentucky county and later as a Kentucky historian at the University of Kentucky. This led to a dissertation on boss politics in twentieth-century Kentucky, which was expanded into a book on that topic with the University Press of Kentucky. Bolin has also published on the history of Kentucky Baptists in the last century and labor strife in the western Kentucky coalfield. However, state politics and history are not the focus of his essays. He confesses that he has tried to avoid controversial subjects. State politics would almost certainly lead to controversy these days. It is the readers' loss that Bolin drew such a bright line.

Nevertheless, the essays contain insights that call forth aspects of the Kentucky historian. For example, Bolin praises the work of Cadiz, Kentucky, writer John Egerton, especially his magisterial Generations: An American Family. In it, Egerton explores the familial ties of an elderly Appalachian couple whose lives reveal the American experience. Bolin suggests that his approach to history, like that of Egerton, has the goal of "keeping the link intact between our ancestors and ourselves" (p. 18).

In a later essay, "The Greatest Kentuckian," Bolin borrows from fellow Kentucky historian Thomas Appleton of Eastern Kentucky University hints designed to lead public school audiences and state history students to look beyond the usual list of male leaders by proposing consideration of Linda Neville. Her work in eastern Kentucky helped to eradicate trachoma, a disease that left untreated would have blinded thirty-three thousand residents in the region.

Home and Away beckons the reader with a well-written, comfortable, and easily comprehended collection of homilies drawn from Professor Bolin's life odyssey.