Booklist and Notes

Abstract

Booklist and Notes George Brosi Bailey, Rebecca. A Wild Kentucky Garden. Ashland, Kentucky: Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1998. 96 pages with two photographs and an introduction by Edwina Pendarvis. Trade paperback. $9.95. This attractive little volume is a sampler of both poetry and prose from Rebecca Bailey, a graduate of Hazel Green Academy and Morehead State University, both in Eastern Kentucky. An English teacher and publications director at Morehead, Bailey here shares with the reader the unity she feels between her heritage and her commitment to a sophisticated internationalist and earth-friendly contemporary perspective. A productive garden which is wild rather than ornamentally ordered is a commanding metaphor for her lifestyle and her art. Becker, Jane S. Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930-1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 331 pages with an index, bibliography, notes, and 37 photographs. Hardback in dustjacket, $55.00. Trade paperback, $18.95. This book about the marketing of Appalachian crafts fills in many gaps between the two best-known previous books on this subject: Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands by Alan Eaton (1937) and The Handicraft Revival in Southern Appalachia: 1930-1960 by Garry Barker (1991). However, it approaches regional crafts in a very different spirit from Eaton or Barker. In many respects this is a sequel to Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness: 1879-1920 by Henry D. Shapiro (1978), because it thoroughly examines the way that regional craftsmen were presented to the national public. Nevertheless, this book most fundamentally is a follow-up study to All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region by David Whisnant (1983), because it most carefully examines how regional craftspeople were being affected by media images of regional realities. Altogether this is a fascinating account which illuminates an important era of regional economic and cultural history. George Brosi operates an online bookstore in Berea: www.appalachianbooks .com 65 Berry, Wendell. The Selected Poems ofWendell Berry. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1998. 178 pages. Hardback in dust jacket. $20.00. Since the 1960s when he began his writing career, Wendell Berry (b. 1934) has been increasingly recognized as a prophetic spokesman for profound rural values. These one hundred poems from nine of Berry's fourteen previous collections provide a compilation of his most powerful work. Many of these poems are also included in Collected Poems: 1957-1982, but that was a much more expansive collection, and it is now out of print. Furthermore, this new selection does include poems from Entries (1997) not included in the earlier work. However, poems which have been inspired by Berry's Sunday walks on his Kentucky River farm and collected in The Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 (1998) are not represented in this collection. The New York Times Book Review noted that his "straightforward search for a life connected to the soil, for marriage as a sacrament...affirms a style that is resonant with the authentic...He can be said to have returned American poetry to a Wordsworthian clarity of purpose." Choi, Susan. The Foreign Student: A Novel. New York: Harper Flamingo, 1998. 325 pages. Hardback in dust jacket. $23.00. Set in 1955 in Sewanee, Tennessee, before the University of the South was co-ed, this is a love story between a Korean student, Chang Ahn, and a young woman, Katherine Monroe, who lives at her parents' summer home on the mountain near the university. Both hold dark secrets. Chang, known as "Chuck," was a POW during the Korean war, and Katherine has been sleeping with a popular professor since she was fourteen. "First novelist Choi blends unlikely elements into a resonant story that immerses the reader in the times, places and lives of her characters as only the best fiction can."-Booklist. Susan Choi was born in Indiana in 1969 and raised in Texas, and now lives in New York City. Clark, Jim. West Virginia: The Allegheny Highlands. Englewood, Colorado: Westcliffe Publishers, 1998. 119 pages, most with color photographs. Foreword by Virginia Marie Peterson. Oversized hardback in dust jacket. $39.95. A native of War, West Virginia, in the...