Sense of Place in Appalachia, and: Kinfolks and Custard Pie (review)

"V" to velvet ash. Kumquat uses the "C" sound and Yew for "Y" invites confusion with "U." The success of A B Cedar lies in the design and illustrations of Tom Parker. As in most excellent picture books, he has ingeniously expanded and interwoven the text with surprising and delightful visual detail. From the first double page spread and through most of the book, Parker incorporates an A to Z frieze in black, superimposed on its shadow in gray on the top border. Black silhouettes of each tree rise from a solid black bottom border, and upon this border the reader sees a miniature theatre as people and pets in black silhouette portray amusing or unexpected detail-umbrellas under the umbrella tree or the lady in a wheelchair by the elder. Parker further extends the text by presenting shape and size relationships. Each silhouetted tree is relationally correct not only in height, shape, and width to each other, but also to the people nearby. Between the upper and lower friezes, hands reach into the center with leaves, blossoms, and fruit. These, too, are in proper proportion to the hands, in color and superimposed upon their shadows . Because of A B Cedar's visual interest, it will appeal to children and adults. A brief glossary would have been a helpful feature, especially for unfamiliar terms, such as "xolisma." Readers might well model Lyon's exercise for other plant or animal life. Not only would they identify the sometimes difficulty of this seemingly easy task, but if it began an awareness of our endangered environment , that would be no mean return. -Ray Turner Whitson, S. Mont, editor. Sense of Place in Appalachia. Morehead, KY: Morehead State University, 1988. Lambert, Walter N. Kinfolks and Custard Pie, Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1988. This book contains a collection of papers delivered at a symposium organized by Whitson and held at Morehead State in October 1987. Just about everybody who is anybody in the field of Appalachian studies is either the author of a paper or quoted somewhere in the volume. In a multidisciplinary way, it explores a topic important to many mountain people and of course central to this magazine. That topic, evident in the book's title, is explored from a number of different angles. An idea of the range of papers may be gained from the number delivered under each of the symposium's topic areas: the history of Appalachia (five papers), its literature (4), religion (2), art and music (3), sociology and psychology (4), geography (2), a category entitled "community" (3), and media (2). It is an impressive look at the Southern mountains and the way people feel about them. As with any collection, the reader may expect to find a few flaws. Some of the papers, of course, are better than others, and some otherwise excellent papers suffer a bit from translation into print. Loyal Jones, for example, designed his contribution to be accompanied by music and meant it to be delivered orally. William T. Clark's presentation also suffers, in this case because it was originally supposed to accompany a slide show. The reader will also find some of the material redundant . Not only are the participants speaking about the same general topic, but most of them are close acquaintances and thoroughly familiar with each others' work. One should therefore not be surprised that John Stephenson quotes "The Brier Losing Touch With His Traditions" and so does the poem's author, Jim Wayne Miller. What may be surprising (and it is evidently a sign of the subject's richness) is 64 that there is not more of that sort of thing. Overall, the quality of the collection is very high indeed. If it is important for Appalachians to know something about their region, and most of these writers would argue it is vitally so, then this book would be an excellent place for them to begin their study. The authors make a good case for the uniqueness of Appalachia. They claim that the area's residents have a much stronger relationship to the land than do residents in many other areas of the country. They go on to...