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  • New Book Notes
  • George Brosi
Kathy Ackerman. Coal River Road: Poetry. Livingston, Ala.: Livingston Press, 2013. 88 pages. Trade paperback. $16.95.

Coal River Road tallies the spiritual cost of one family’s migration northward from the tapped-out coal seams of Appalachian poverty…” –Dorothy Barresi. “Road contains some of the strongest poems to come out of the Appalachian mountains in recent years.” –Joseph Bathanti. Ackerman is the author of a critical biography of Olive Tilford Dargan and is the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Isothermal Community College. She lives in Tryon, North Carolina.

Bob Henry Baber, Jason Gum, and Mark Romano, editors. Heroes Among Us. Glenville, W. Va.: Glenville State College Press, 2012. 195 pages. Trade paperback. $20.00.

This book was made possible by Glenville State College’s West Virginia Veteran’s Legacy Project. It consists mostly of two-page pictorial spreads celebrating the service of individual West Virginia veterans.

Bob Barnett. Hillside Fields: A History of Sports in West Virginia. Morgan-town: West Virginia University Press, 2013. 352 pages. Trade paperback. $22.99.

This book is the culmination of Bob Barnett’s thirty-five years teaching sports history at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia.

Bill Best. Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste: Heirloom Seed Savers in Appalachia. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013. 200 pages with index and photos. Trade paperback. $22.95.

Billy Best came to Berea, Kentucky, from Haywood County, North Carolina, and established a farm and a forty-year career as a coach, professor, and administrator at Berea College. This book brings together his academic acumen and his devotion to regional small farmers. “Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste is a practical and useful handbook for good garden husbandry but as it unfolds before your eyes, it reveals as well a vital world of [End Page 98] southern Appalachian people, plants, food, and practice to nourish both body and soul.” –Ronni Lundy

George Brosi and Kate Egerton, editors. Samantha Cole, and Morgan Cottrell, student editors. Appalachian Gateway: An Anthology of Contemporary Stories and Poetry. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013. 319 pages. Trade paperback. $29.95.

This anthology provides biographical sketches along with stories and poems from twenty-five of the region’s most distinguished contemporary authors. It makes for enjoyable reading for the region’s visitors, its new residents, and its natives. It is suitable for regional creative writing classes, Appalachian studies course, and especially for the Appalachian literature curriculum. Students will appreciate the fact that two of the coeditors are students from Appalachia.

Alex Browning. The Last Soul of Witherspoon: Life In a Kentucky Mountain Settlement School. Bloomington, Ind.: Balboa Press, 2013. 213 pages. Trade paperback. $16.99.

Witherspoon College was the name given when the settlement school at Buckhorn, Kentucky, in Perry County, made a short-lived attempt to supplement its secondary school with a college department. Alex Browning was a student at Buckhorn, and this autobiography tells of his growing up in Lee County, his years at Buckhorn, and his life as an Eastern Kentucky educator.

Brad Butkovich. The Battle of Pickett’s Mill: Along the Dead Line. Charleston, S.C.: History Press, 2013. 205 pages with maps, photos, bibliography and index. Trade paperback. $21.99.

This Civil War battle, fought in Pauling County on May 27, 1864, was a rare defeat for Union General Sherman as he marched through Georgia.

Amy D. Clark and Nancy M. Hayward, editors. Talking Appalachian: Voice, Identity, and Community. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013. 256 pages. Pictorial hardcover. $50.00.

The scholarship of Michael Montgomery and Anita Puckett, the memoirs of Lee Smith and Silas House, novel excerpts from Ron Rash and Denise Giardina, a story by Crystal Wilkinson, and a poem by Anne Shelby together make a very compelling book. Clark teaches English at the University of Virginia at Wise, near where she grew up, and Hayward teaches English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. [End Page 99]

Cheryl Denise. What’s in the Blood. Telford, Pa.: Cascadia Publishing House LLC, 2012. 116 pages. Trade paperback. $12.95.

Cheryl Denise lives in Shepherds Field, West Virginia, a Christian...

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