New Book Notes

Abstract

NEW BOOK NOTES George Brosi Jacqueline Grisby Burnside. Berea and Madison County. Mount Pleasant, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2007. 126 pages with photos. Trade paperback. $19.99. Nobody is better qualified to contribute the book on Berea for the Black America Series ofArcadia Publishing than Jacqueline Grisby Burnside. Her Ph.D. dissertation at Yale concerned the interracial heritage of Berea, and she has been deeply involved in the Historic Black Berea Project, which has created a touring map with an audio tape and CD. She chairs the Sociology Department at her alma mater, Berea College. This book consists primarily ofphotographs with captions. Bob L. Cox. Fiddlin Charlie Bowman: An East Tennessee Old-Time Music Pioneer and His Musical Family. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007. 224 pages, with an afterword by Archie Green and photos. Trade paperback. $24.95. Charlie Bowman (1889-1989) was not onlya talented musician but also a person who happened to live almost all ofhis one hundred years right at the cutting edge ofsignificant developments in the burgeoning musical genres called old-time and country and western swing. He grew up in Washington County, Tennessee, only a few miles from Bristol, the town that would become the epicenter of the evolution of old-time music into modern country music. This is a biography of Charlie Bowman, the story of his large family, the tale of a mountain community as well as the saga of an American region and its music. The author is the great nephew of the subject of the biography and a chemical engineer who is retired from Eastman in Kingsport. Adda Leah Davis. Luanda's Mountain. Charleston, West Virginia: Mountain State Press, 2007. 315 pages with an introduction byJerry Beasley. Trade paperback. $14.95. 114 Set in West Virginia, this is a coming-of-age novel of Lucinda Harmon, who struggles with age-old conflicts between family traditions and individual aspirations. It is told by Adda Leah Davis, a voice as authentic and compelling as ever endeavored to tell a mountain story. A native of McDowell County, West Virginia, Davis now lives in Russell County, Virginia. She is a retired elementary teacher and counselor who is the author of six books. "Addie Davis's own wisdom and compassion inform her extraordinary novel. The struggles of the entire Appalachian Region are incorporated into Lucinda's moving and memorable personal story. This is the real thing. And Lucinda will steal your heart."—Lee Smith. Jimmy Carl Harris. Wounds ThatBind: Stories. Oak Ridge, Tennessee: Iris Press, 2007. 141 pages. Hardback with dust jacket. $26.00. This is a book ofsixteen short stories written byJimmy Carl Harris of Birmingham, Alabama. Harris enlisted in the Marines out of high school and rose to the rank of Sergeant Major. Upon retirement from the military, he earned a doctorate in literature at the University of Alabama and pursued a career as a professor at Southeastern Louisiana University. He is now also retired from academia and writes fiction full-time. "Jimmy Carl Harris writes with stunning tenderness about those that life has deemed out-of-bounds: old soldiers who have lost fingers but not hope; old women alone and misunderstood, living off memories and cigarettes. Wounds That Bind is a fierce, gut-wrenching collection, but always beneath the hard edges one senses Harris's deep love and understanding for the men and women that life has not always treated gently."—Mark Powell. Carolyn Jourdan. Heart in the Right Pkce: A Memoir. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books ofChapel Hill, 2007. 297 pages. Hardback with dust jacket. $23.95. Already selected by three book clubs, this compelling book has touched the heart-strings of thousands. The author grew up in East Tennessee as the daughter of a family doctor and his receptionist wife, but chose education and migration from the area, landing in D.C. working for an influential U. S. Senator. Then her mother became ill, and she volunteered to fill-in for a few days back home—days that "5 turned into the year-plus time period memorably detailed on these pages. "This is a wonderful book I would've enjoyed it even if Carolyn wasn't a neighbor of...