There are tons of "I Hiked the Appalachian Trail" books, and just as many "How to Hike the Appalachian Trail" books, but this is the only one that tells (and explains) what you are going to see while you're out there. Why does a particular flower grow here and not there? What kind of forest am I walking through? How can I tell the difference between bear scat and fox scat? Why are there no trees on the top of this mountain when there is no true treeline in the South?
Then there are the little tidbits like why a box turtle is called a box turtle, how rhodendron grows in such dense thickets, and how bogs come to be.
A great book--and the winner of the Society of American Travel Writer's Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award for best new guidebook.

Book was in excellent condition for being used. The book was well protected during shipping. Arrived in a reasonable time period. Great christmas gift!

This books contains everything you would ever want to know or would expect to encounter on the Appalachian Trail. It gives a quick overview of the history of the trail and a concise description of how the Appalachian Mountains came into being and why they look the way they do today. Individual chapters cover the trees, flowers, mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians found along the trail. In easy to understand writing, Adkins provides bits of information on how a plant reproduces, where it lives, why it looks the way it does, etc. The chapters on mammals, birds and reptiles not only give an identification description of each animal, but also how it goes about its daily life and what signs to look for to see if it has been in the area recently. The book won the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award, and deserves it. I found my walks in the woods to be greatly enhanced after looking through this book.

I've long been interested in Cades Cove history. As a native East Tennessean, I grew up with the many stories in legends that came from the area. Dunn, grandson of the last man to leave the cove, uses town records and family stories to paint a vivid account of life in the area. Dunn addresses many of the misconceptions about the town and shows a town of people that struggled from the town's beginning to the forced withdrawal to build the Great Smokies National Park. This book will most appeal to scholars, but anyone interested in Southern history would also enjoy it. Highly recommended.

I have visited Cades Cove over 10 times and still find something interesting on each trip. This book was extremely insightful because I actually knew many of the names in the book and the places discussed. If you've never been to the area, you may find the book less insightful though. I love Cades Cove, and I loved this book.

After a trip to Cades Cove and Townsend to research my family tree I was intrigued by the area. Mr. Dunn's work on Cades Cove presents the history of the area in a well-researched yet enjoyable manner. I read the book in a sitting. I would really like to know more about the Chestnut Flats area!

These are powerful stories that weave both family and history into one cloth. I have seen her perform some of them. They live equally in the performance and on the page.

If you are a storyteller, if you are interested in portraying historic characters, if you like good writing--then this slim volume is for you. Goodman creates six characters drawn from the strong women of her southwestern Virginia childhood mountain roots. Each tale can stand alone, but together they form a sga of the mountains that shaped the six lives. The clear, srtong voices created by Goodman's pen lifts the women from any stereotypical stigmas. They are very real, some, eerily real. Warning: Despite it's division into six parts,do not expect to be able to put this work down and pick it up again later: Each story is complete, but the power of Goodman's writing hold you until all six tales are read and you will ache for more. As a read-aloud it has even more power. Her ability to make the story "live" in two worlds is a testament to her poetic abiliteis and skill as a storyteller.

Daughters of the Appalachians: Six Unique Women Author: Linda Goodman Publisher: Overmountain Press 1999 Review ©Beth Surdut 2000 As the best storytellers do, writer/performer Linda Goodman seasons her tales with the honey and vinegar of life. "Daughters of the Appalachians: Six Unique Women" is a collection of first person accounts molded from insights and stories culled from Goodman's family and community in the mountains and hollers of Virginia. That she speaks in the voices of Appalachian women adds a layer of learning for those of us who grew up elsewhere, but yearning and basic gut emotions intertwined with strength and self-esteem are universal. Goodman's women may not take long to meet, but they will make a home in your memory. I have a clear and painful picture of Harlene's Daddy kicking that dog. I am so pleased that Sara Jane found a good man to love. I just don't know how I feel about that crazy girl who murdered the little boy. I have attended and reviewed many storytelling performances and spent the last year producing an oral history by a man who tells a good story but is far from a professional storyteller. As a performer Linda Goodman becomes the very characters she writes about; as a writer she presents their voices just as convincingly. I can assure readers that Ms. Goodman is an extraordinarily creative professional who deserves to be heard. This talented writer should not be pigeonholed. Parallels could be drawn to certain genres of popular Latin American literature where the boundaries between the dead and the living are not so stringently drawn, where dreams and reality mesh, and desire overcomes circumstance. Her stories may begin in the South, but her compass points to the territory of human understanding.

I wish more people would discover this talented author. Because his publisher had limited distribution power, this book got lost in the shuffle and it's just not fair. This is one of the best short story collections of recent years, full of powerful plots and prose so beautiful that it practically drips from the page. Holbrook does not bow to stereotype or hide the truth about Appalachia: he simply writes what he knows. A classic in the genre, as every bit as good as the better known work of fellow Kyian Chris Offutt. if you like quality short fiction, this is a terrific book.

This book is a masterful portrayal of the hill people of Eastern Kentucky. Holbrook's characters are real people who live in the hills and hollows of this region. This book has it all: hardworking and content people who are going to be forced from their home by the construction of a road; a young man who is forced to leave a home that was spoiled by the death of a brother; an alcoholic who is cast out into the world after his parents die and struggles with himself to correct his erring ways. These stories are all too common in real life and it's about time that someone put them on paper.

Chris Holbrook's story collection is full of grit and sardonic humor. His representation of modern Appalachia depicts a region where traditional and modern values conflict---a place where Hell and Ohio are as foreign as a month without its "first" holiday. HELL AND OHIO continues a rich tradition of Appalachian storytelling at its finest.

"Memories From Dante: The Life of a Coal Town" is far more than just a trip down memory lane of a small town in the coal fields of SW VA. The detailed oral histories and the huge number of photographs do provide those living in the area with the chance to renew old memories but it also provides researcheers and scholars with a social, economic, political, religious, and family history of the town and area. Anyone interested in a comprehensive study of a coal town needs this book. I especially recommend it for libraries and archives. Kathy Shearer has done a remarkable job of helping the people of Dante tell their story. Perhaps she never saw a lumb of coal before she came to the area (all the Dante mines are closed now) but the town and its elderly residents live in her book. Without any sense of superiority she has enpowered these people to tell the world what it was like to live in a time and a place now largely forgotten.

This Book took me back to a childhood that many of us only wish we could revisit. Kathy Shearer was able to catch the history of a wonderful little coal town and bring it to everyone's attention. People who grew up in a small town will be able to relate and relive the pleasures of a hometown community. Kathy Shearer took us all back to a time of childhood happiness. This is a wonderful book to read and learn of the struggles these people lived while trying to make a living mining coal and how they held on to each other for support and survival.

I bought this book thinking it's just another novice trying to write about something they know little about, but what a suprise when I started reading it. Kathy has done a thoroughly wonderful job describing these hard working, hard living and honest people in such vivid color you become friends with them instantly.
They become your family, and you love them, laught with them, cry with them, and hate them but you cannot forget them.
She is a first class writer and deserves high praise for a book which is both entertaining and historically founded.
I am just waiting for the sequel.

"Philip Jenks should be feared for what he's yet to write. His first full-length book reads as if Patmos had been an island in West Virginia, and now that Jenks is back among us, all will be converted to 'The New Jesus,' or at least made to look back over our shoulders. These are poems of reckoning, and poems to be reckoned with. Some of what sets Jenks apart from the slew of 'new American voices' is his comfort under a quilt of dialects, and with schools of thought that run the table up through a Foucaultian paranoia (in the foreboding 'Panoptikos') to the domestically ominous eye that his mother paints on the clock: 'His speech is from crevices / running diagonal through the /underneath what was A&P.'"

--Christopher Mattison, Boston Review

Philip Jenks has written one of the first great books of poetry in America in this new century. I can't think of a stranger, more necessary set of poems than those gathered here. Superficially, Jenks appears to have been schooled in some of the tactics of Language poetry, but the disjunctions of these lyrics feel less theorized than Language work and much more embodied, as in a spasm or a psychic hiccup. The "hypothetical antipodes," for example, engages the idea of an upside-down netherworld as a map of perverse inner space perfectly reflecting an injust outer world. It's as if Blake had read Olson or Hannah Arendt. "My mind gleams like the fangs/ of a viper in white heat/ dying to sink my teeth into/ the throat of something wrong." I noticed that Peter O'Leary unpacks some of the poems in this book (already!) in his book on Robert Duncan, Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness. Evidently, Jenks has epilepsy and O'Leary tries to attribute some of the aspects of his poetry to this condition. Whether you buy this connection, you should buy this book regardless. It is unconditionally terrific. Essential.

Philip Jenks has written a poetry of shards and ruins washed up from the Monongahela with Appalachian spirit, linguistic acumen, wit and terror. Some might note a disjuncture of sequencing, I find these disjunctures - the spaces between the poems - like the spaces between image and sound, audience, writer, reception and dictation. What is said and what is unsaid cohere in pithy and vibrant flashes of lyric. For what it's worth, I don't know who to compare Jenks to - all the better.

River of Memories: An Appalachian Boyhood by David L. Thompson is an excellent book for all people of all ages. It really allows the reader to understand the way everyday life was in Appalachia. It reminds us of the importance of family, friends, hard work, and God's influence. It brings out the best of a time that has passed, but will never be forgotten.

In order for us to truly understand ourselves, we must look to our heritage. As Mr. Thompson recalls to his readers the vivid memories of an Appalachian childhood, he entangles them with the warmth of a heritage that may someday be forgotten. This work will possibly answer many questions of future generations who may ask "what is Appalachia?"

Mr. Thompson's is a wonderful tale of a young man growing up in rural America. It tells of a wonderful childhood filled with loving memories in a time when a child was still allowed to be a child. It has both good and bad memories that add up to the formation of an interesting individual and family that anyone would enjoy getting to know. If everyone could only be so lucky as to know someone like this it would improve the world as a whole.

This manual contains an abundance of real-life scenarios that give the reader a "feel" for the river. It shows by one example after another how complex the swiftwater rescue problem can become, and how sophisticated the rescue solution ought to be. The reader is challenged over and over to think things through and learn how to respond properly to various situations.

Although this book is not designed to serve as the primary instructional text for swiftwater rescue training, it should be required reading for such a program, and can be used as an adjunct to any swiftwater rescue curriculum

I picked up this book two weeks after I went on my first whitewater rafting trip because there was so much I didn't know about the river. This book gave me a great introduction to what the river is capable of and what to do if something goes wrong. If you travel the river, you should read this book or something of its quality. The book covers rescue equipment and rescue procedures and operations very well. Little did I know that a few months after I read this book I'd be on the Ottawa River and use these techniques to possibly save my life or serious injury. If it wasn't for this book and what I learned in it, I may have been seriously hurt on the McCoy Rapids. I don't know what I would have done without this book and I'm glad I didn't have to find out. If you whitewater kayak, canoe or raft, get this book or "Swiftwater Rescue". It may just save your life one day, hopefully you'll never need it. It's better to have the knowledge and not use it then to need it and not have it.

This book covers the basics of river rescue. It's not really an in depth book. You would definately benefit from a book about technical rope rescue. This book shows briefly how to make some rope rescue systems, but that's not really its strength. Some sort of first aid/emergency care manual and/or training should accompany this book because they go hand-in-hand.

This book is a neccessity for anyone who is a river runner! It not only covers rescue techniques from the gurus of whitewater rescue, Les Bechdel and Slim Ray, but it also covers ways that one can prevent an accident from happening in the first place.

This is on my list of Most Favorite Books Ever! I've looked for SHADY GROVE for years as a gift for people I love, but it's been long out of print. Thank goodness it's again available. The book, which is about the Sudley Fowler family of Broke Neck, Ky, including their relationships--regular and irregular---moonshining, Lonelyhearts letters, government men, picking and grinning, hound dogs, getting "on the draw," and that old time relgion.
Mostly, though, it's about a way of life unique in all the world, and there's a belly laugh on every page.
Oh, gentlemen, you are mortally going to love this one!

I love this book. It is the funniest book that I have ever read. I could just picture them running up on that porch in that old car that was out of control. Every time I get slightly depressed, I re-read this book. I will always have a copy. It's good medicine.

This is the funniest book I have ever read. After reading the first page, I could not put it down. I wanted to know why that preacher wound up with a guitar around his neck. I wanted to know why the television crew was there in Broke Neck. This book is for everyone who enjoys a good laugh. It is just pure fun from the first page to the last.

From the hung jury at the opening that releases Buck Price for the second time to the final rendering of "mountain justice," The Sound of Distant Thunder takes command with Appalachian authenticity. The voice is true, the justice horrifying, the perpetrator a real surprise. There is a pattern here; it's good, down to earth writing. If you like a read that rings true to human nature, The Sound of Distant Thunder is for you.

This book is a success as a love story and a suspense novel. It's greatest success is as an appalachian novel. Specifically the characters are very well drawn mountain people. Highly enjoyable book.

One will soon understand why The Sound of Distant Thunder won the 1999 Book of the Year Award of the Appalachian Writers Association. It's an honest book about folks who live in the hills and coves of Western North Carolina. Sharyn McCrumb's books tell about the mountains in a fair and straightforward way, and so does this book. You will find The Sound of Distant Thunder an excellent read.