West Virginia Books

KIDS LOVE THE VIRGINIAS has been kid-tested and the descriptions include great hints on what kids like best. This informative guide contains almost 300 pages packed full of over 900 places and events specifically designed for children between the ages of 2 - 15. Kids can discover where ponies swim and dolphins dance, dig into archaeology and living history, or be dazzled by record-breaking and natural bridges. It'll tell you how Colonial, American Indian and Pioneer folks lived and even how to dance the Virginia Reel or cook with stones. You'll know where to go to stand side-by-side a coal-miner, watch a glass vase "blossom" before you yes or learn the secrets of making clay bricks, digging for fairy stones, commanding a battleship or spaceship, or making pinch pots. Another weekend you'll have all the travel details you need to go behind the scenes of famous parade floats or walk through HolyLand. Of course, there's plenty of kid-friendly details on nationally known sites like Mt. Vernon, Luray Cavern's fried eggs, the Bee Beard Man, places where the Civil War began (Harpers Ferry) and ended (Appomattox), Williamsburg, Yorktown, and Jamestown or "Stonewall Country" (freak-out). Want Action? Trolley, trot or walk past famous homes. Drive your car underwater or through a zoo. Kayak many quiet rivers or raft the whitewaters. Ride a batteau on the James, touch a starfish, or catch a wink from a mermaid. Pack your knapsack as you follow "A Soldier's Life". Or, ride the rails past old depots and small towns through old coal and timber lands. If you're hungry, KIDS LOVE THE VIRGINIAS knows where to buy a skipjack sandwich, be a salsa taste-tester, or make potato chips, gourmet cakes & curds. It'll tell you how to eat your way through apple, birthday cake, pumpkin & peanut festivals. Unusual theme restaurants include old taverns or railroad depots, a gristmill serving yummy corn cakes, dining in the same room Washington once celebrated birthdays, or reminiscing simpler times on Walton's Mountain. The book is formatted in 8 geographical zones providing phone numbers, websites, directions, admissions, hours and descriptions to save you lots of time. It's a wonderful resource to make short vacation plans or to get to know your hometown area better. You will probably find there are at least 50-100 things to do within an hour of your home! Best of all, if you have a limited budget, don't worry - the book has found lots of places to visit for little or no charge! Other 'family-friendly' favorite travel guides available for Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Indiana, & Kentucky

Also recommended: Other 'family-friendly' favorite travel guides available for Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky, & Kids Love Travel Memories, the Perfect Scrapbook and Travel Journal Companion

If you like the serene image on the cover of pinetrees reflected on midnight-blue water, then you will love the word-images inside this volume of poetry.
"Inisheer floats like vapor, seaside lights are sequined far below" are a dream of Ireland, of a time from a past life perhaps, another existence when life was simple and quiet and beautiful.
The poetry is far more than peaceful though. It is at times mysterious: "Eight skeletal disks bloom unpetaled on West Virginia farmland. They turn their heads..."
And sometimes the words invoke turbulence: "...stitching and unstitching the wild swans that marked my way here to the fuchsia that bleed on Iish Mor where fishermen sail an ashen sea."
And there's hope: "all the way back, me singing half-remembered songs; Silently we turned in midnight flowers and followed the summer moon pearled in the gray hand of morning."

If you are unsure whether or not to buy this book, wait no longer. Its rhythms and images, struggle and hope, moon and sun will surely bless you.

Chuck Kinder's redneck roots have served him well. Last Mountain Dancer, his "meta-memoir," is taken up with his childhood home of West Virginia. Readers are treated to everything from his adolescent years as a bona fide outlaw, pulling armed robberies with a sociopathic father figure named Morris Hacket; to buying all his dear old mother's crocheted comforters from an "artsy-fartsy artiste type" proprietor of a craft store so that his mother, with months of no sales, wouldn't feel "lower than whale bowels on the bottom of the ocean;" to packing a half-dozen brazed possum sandwiches and long necked Budweisers and driving the West Virginia hills with his sister and brother-in-law; to his fascination with a paranoid West Virginia Elvis impersonator named Jessico White, the last mountain dancer of the title; to an impassioned defense of Sid Hatfield, the fabled coal miner's advocate murdered by West Virginian authorities in 1921. The book is stunning both for its honesty and for the force of his prose. Often, Kinder's most beautifully written prose accompanies descriptions of horrible events or the most painful self-discoveries. For example:

"There was absolutely no private mythology left behind what passed for my personality. Not unlike other foolish, floundering middle-aged men, I didn't believe in a thing that seemed to matter. My life had broken down like an old heap on the highway" (Dancer, p. 139).

And then, some two hundred pages later,
"I had begun to fancy myself as one of those uniquely American types who define themselves primarily in the loss and betrayal of themselves and what they love. For Proust (a somewhat similar European type), the only true paradise was a lost paradise, and love was not fully itself until it was lost, until it became memory, became the stuff of story. At its heart, every story is about a lost world... ." (p. 349).

After much soul searching and confronting of his foibles and doomed hopes, he decides to embark on a journey of self-discovery, aware of creating a new fable for himself and of his inconsistency:

"I was deep into my fable of embarkment. I was sipping ice-cold vodka straight like a seasoned hardboiled ironist and vaguely wondering if my upcoming self-proclaimed voyage of self-discovery would be in truth simply another frivolous fiction of self-invention. Steadfastly true at least to my inconstancy, I sat there in the monastery of myself thinking that the only thing I ever knew for sure was what I made up" (p. 381).

There is much to admire and enjoy in this book, written by the purported Grady Trip of "Wonderboy's" fame. Kinder has written three novels that also provide great literary experiences: "Silver Ghost," "Snakehunter," and "Honeymooners" (about his raucus life with Raymond Carver).

Woodland Press LLC / October 2007

Reviewed by Martel Sardina

Genre anthologies are a tough nut to crack. Readers are typically drawn in by the big name authors and expect those to be the only "good" stories in the collection. The bar is set high when names like Monteleone, Waggoner, Nassise and Burke appear on the list of contributors. It is rare to find an anthology where every story in the collection is not only well-written, but also compelling. Legends of the Mountain State is one of the rare cases where every story delivers on both counts.

The collection opens with Tom Monteleone's "Images in Anthracite." Our hero, Cort Fallon, lost his father at the age of ten due to an accident in the Pickman Mine. Years later, he receives a strange letter from a man who claims Cort's childhood home is haunted by the ghost of Cort's father. After much debate with his friend, Kevin, the two decide to investigate the man's claims and find the ghost's reappearance may be connected to General Energy's plan to re-open the Pickman Mine. Now that Cort has learned more about his father's accident and General Energy's plans, what can he do to stop them?

What happens when a detective can't solve a case in time to save lives? In "How The Night Receives Them," Kealan Patrick Burke's detective has been dubbed "The Poet" due to writing a poem about a case that continues to plague him despite the fact the killer is being brought to justice. Burke paints a gut-wrenching portrait of a man consumed by regret.

Editor Michael Knost must have known that for every good detective story there should be a story of equal merit examining the other side of the law. In Legends of the Mountain State, we are given a couple of different glimpses into how the bad guys live. Joseph Nassise's hit man in "Money Well-Earned" is hired to kill a monster, the legendary Mothman. When he learns that the Mothman's touch brings warnings of future evils, he must decide who the real monster is. Bev Vincent plays a game of smoke and mirrors using the legend of "Screaming Jenny" to cover up a crime.

West Virginia as a setting is rich with the necessary elements for weaving ghostly tales. Coal mines, remote farms, and winding mountain roads in small towns combined with people who believe the lore makes for a fantastic backdrop for the collection's adventures to unfold. Those who are unfamiliar with West Virginia may come away from reading this collection wondering which of our states can really call themselves the "most haunted." West Virginia may now be a contender for that title.

Purchase Legends of the Mountain State, edited by Michael Knost.

This book is a perfect gift for anyone who likes WVU basketball. It covers all the coaches, All-Americans and great wins in WVU basketball history up to 1998. There are also some pictures of the old Fieldhouse, now Stansbury Hall, and the Coliseum. I think that with the success of last year's Mountaineer team a new edition should be released to cover the John Beilien era at WVU

Selina Huntington Bakewell Campbell (1802-1897) had it right, when she advised a young convert, "Let many of your evening hours be set apart for reading works that will strengthen your faith, and enlarge and ennoble your mind."

Little did she know that her advice would one day apply to a wonderful book about herself, The Life of Selina Campbell: A Fellow Soldier in the Cause of Restoration. Selina, the second wife of Alexander Campbell, was a great Christian leader in her own right.

The book is well researched and cites many primary sources. It teaches much about the lives of nineteenth-century American frontier women and Selina Campbell. One is also led to appreciate the the influence Selina had on her husband and what has become known as the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement (the religious bodies of the Disciples of Christ, Christian Church/Church of Christ, and Churches of Christ).

The book includes an extensive bibliography and an index.

This reknowned book about the notorious correspondence womanizer and murderer Harry F. Powers from Clarksburg West Virginia that caused quite a stir back in that community in the 1930's with a theater substituting for a courtroom and of course his ultimate hanging.His persona was loosely based on Robert Mitchum's portrayal in the movie"The Night of The Hunter" based on the book by Davis Grubb.It's a rare book,hard to find that was published back in 1931 and hopefully it should be republished someday especially in paperback.West Virginia University Press and other publishers should take note!!!!!!!!!

Excellent book on Irish rebel songs, their history and lyric variations .

Even though I was a student at Marshall U. from 1967 to 1971, an advid supporter of M.U. sports, and even tried to play a little football there in 1967, I was really surprised to learn what exactly went on at Marshall in the late 1960's and early 1970's. The recent movie WE ARE MARSALL, did not touch on some of the real problems MU was having in its football program along with its other sports. This book explains why the faculty and others wanted to drop the MU football, not the the story-line as presented in the "Hollywood-version" "true story" movie. I was their in that time frame, and I did not remember some of the details as displayed in the movie, but when I read this book all those rumors I really heard in 1969, 1970, & 1971(that I had forgotten about over time), came back to me, and finally made sense.
This book is great and I wish it had come out before the movie. This books presented a better story-line, as it dealt with the truth, and if filmmakers were so inclined, this story would have probably made a better movie.

This book is a great comprehensive history of a college that had to overcome tremendous odds to get back on its' feet and survive. I was a student at Marshall during these difficult times and I found the book a great history of what happened and a tribute to the spirit of a great school. Marshall has a great legacy....We Are Marshall...