Write-Ups

Abstract

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS Write-Ups George Brosi Wendell Berry. The Way ofIgnorance: And Other Essays. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard Publishers, 2005. 180 pages with articles by Daniel Kemmis and Courtney White. Hardback with dust jacket. $24.00. One of my most beloved Wendell Berry poems, "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" contains one of my favorite poetry lines, "Praise ignorance, / for what man has not encountered, he has not destroyed." Of course Berry is not so much praising ignorance as damning the arrogance which assumes mankind can know everything and the concomitant self-centeredness which leads to the destruction of our land and people. This book of recent essays and speeches takes that sentiment as a starting point and delves into it more deeply. In the Preface, Berry writes, "the work that I feel best about I have done as an amateur: for love. But in my essays especially, I have been motivated also by fear of our violence to one another and the world, and by my hope that we might do better." Wendell Berry was recently named one of Smithsonian's 35 People Who Made A Difference, and Noel Perrin, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review termed him "one of the half-dozen living American authors who . . . are absolutely inimitable." "We desperately need a prophet of responsibility" writes Bill McKibben in the New York Review of Books, and "Berry may be the closest to one we have." Berry and his wife, Tanya, farm organically with horses on the Kentucky River near where it empties into the Ohio. He is the author of more than forty books of poetry, fiction and essays and an article in the Summer 2005 issue of Appalachian Heritage. Julia Taylor Ebel. Orville Hicks: Mountain Stories, Mountain Roots. Boone, N.C.: Parkway Publishers, 2005. 151 pages with photos. Oversized trade paperback. $14.95. Orville Hicks has a completely unfair advantage when it comes to presenting himself as a story-teller and advocate of old-fashioned mountain living. He is a cousin of Ray Hicks (1922-2003), a Smithsonian "Natural Treasure" and the most celebrated of the recent Appalachian story-tellers. Orville is the great-grandson of Council 108 Harmon (1807-1896), Ray Hicks' father-in-law, who was "discovered" by Richard Chase and became the heart and soul of the book, Jack Tales (1946). Although not very scholarly, this book presents a fun and interesting portrait of one of the leading lights of a place that has come to exemplify mountain folklore: Beech Mountain, North Carolina. Cathryn Hankla. Last Exposures: A Sequence ofPoems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. 55 pages. Trade paperback. $16.95. Although she was raised in the Virginia coalfields and lives in Roanoke, the metropolitan area closest to her origins, Hankla writes in a thoroughly cosmopolitan way and delivers poems which portray Wyoming, Europe and even the Middle East. At the center of this collection, however, are poems about the death of her father at the age of 80. The word-play of the title poem, for example, touches on the profound truths associated with the very practical task of developing the film on the roll he left unfinished when he died. The collection opens with poems which bring fresh light to age-old themes as she considers sexuality as a continuum, both physically and emotionally, not a dichotomy between feminine and masculine opposites. The collection includes two poems which appeared first in Appalachian Heritage. Cathryn Hankla teaches creative writing at Hollins University and is the author of several fiction and poetry books. Dennis Horn, Tathia Cathcart, Thomas E. Hemmerly, and David Duhl, editors. Wildflowers of Tennessee, the Ohio Valley, and the Southern Appalachians. Auburn, WA: Lone Pine Publishers, 2005. 496 page with photos, illustrations, glossary, references, and an index. Trade paperback. $22.95. Notjust another wildflower book, this is the official field guidebook of the Tennessee Native Plant Society. A glossy finish makes it easy to take to the field without worry, and the organization, the color photos, the botany, everything is splendidly presented and authoritative. Kristin Johannsen, Bobbie Ann Mason and Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, editors. Missing Mountains: We Went to the Mountaintop but it Wasn't...