West Virginia Books

I attended a talk Ken Light gave at the Photo SF show this past summer in San Francisco. He discussed this book at length, and shared stories from his career. I also met his wife, Melanie, who conducted the interviews and wrote the text of the book. They are both wonderfully committed to social justice and the use of photography and oral history as a mechanism for communication. I purchased the book later and found the photographs to be both beautiful and informative. Ken remains committed to film and uses medium format cameras. The quality of the images shows that it really works for him. The quality of writing is superb and adds tremendously to the enjoyment of the images. This is a model for anyone interested in documentary story telling and could be used as a complementary text for a course in this subject. I'm glad that Black and White images, along with stories from the "visits" Melanie and Ken had with the families still can find a publisher.

I am a native of McDowell County where many of these photographs were taken, and I cannot recall ever seeing people living in such squalor as was depicted in this book. I am surprised that the Lights were able to come up with so many photographs that represent the southern part of West Virginia in such a bad light. West Virginia does suffer from a depressed economy, but locations with the appalling conditions shown in these photos are not typical of the area. This must be a work of fiction. I hope people won't judge my beautiful state by this book.

Having lived in southern West Virginia for nearly 50 years, I find this work to be insulting to the people of southern West Virginia. The Lights must have looked long and hard to find places with the appalling conditions that have been depicted in this book. Granted, the economy of West Virginia is not stellar, but the majority of its citizens and its communities are not represented in this book. Yes, this state has been shaped by its coal heritage, but it has not been destroyed by it. Southern West Virginia still struggles, but not to the extent implied in these photographs. Those seeking a more accurate portrayal of life in coal communities should look elsewhere, or, better yet, visit and see for themselves.

While Light's pictures are moving and brilliantly taken, he uses his talent to make a second rate piece of agitprop.

This book would have been an accurate representation of coal mining in Appalachia in the 1920's, but it is grossly misrepresenting of this way of life as it exists today and it plays off some of the worst stereotypes of Appalachia including toothless hillbillies and Klansmen. Contemporary coal mining is dangerous work, and always will be, but mineworkers are well paid highly trained individuals who take pride in their ability to survive lean times.

Anyone interested in Appalachia should forego this piece of garbage, get in a car and go see it for themselves.

It doesn't get much better than this, which I guess you should expect from the Professor of Photojournalism at Berkeley! In classic style, Ken Light has captured,with stunning photography, a clear slice of life in the backwaters of the US. Wife Melanie Light has added excellent context with a series of oral histories. Some of it is shocking, some of it is amusing. It is all a riveting read and a must have book for collectors and the curious.

Susan Lepselter's poetic account of the creation of meaning by a betrayed and disenfranchised community is truly mesmerizing, but may be too dense for those uninitiated in the rigmarole of social theory. Her work is actually quite accessible compared to other writers in the field, and so makes itself vulnerable by straddling two different markets, the academic and the quasi-popular. Still, the book is moving and very enjoyable to read, and I can't recommend it enough.

This ethnography is so laden with academic jargon that it is nearly unreadable and the coal mining towns she is supposedly studying are lost amidst Stewart's excessive and meandering theorizing. Stewart fails to center the reader and we are given little background information on the people and places that she is conducting fieldwork on. Nearly every other sentence begins with the annoying command directed at the reader to "picture this" or "imagine that." The few interviews we get from her informants are poorly placed and scantily contextualized. This book is much more about Stewart showing off than coal mining towns and she tosses around quotes by theorists Bakhtin, Kristeva, and Bauman without really understanding what they mean.

Despite her terrible writing, she does make some interesting points, but none insightful enough that you couldn't gather it from a better book that is able to utilize theory in a productive and clear manner. Stewart does make some interesting observations on the talk of the coal mining communities, but again they are lost in the dense tangle of weeds that Stewart mires them in.

Kathleen Stewart's book is not for everyone. Seemingly some people have even taken offense. Still, as a social scientist (I have a chair in organization studies), I cannot recommend this book highly enough, for it represents a critical avenue of development for writing social theory. Whether it presents the truth of the West Virginian experience I cannot say, as I've never visited the hollers she writes of (but I haven't seen a better analysis either, so I intend to believe her until somebody effectively disproves her), but I can state that she has found a way of writing about her experiences and communicating theory which is amazingly fresh and goes directly to the problem of developing critique in late modernity. I've rarely been moved to tears by a non-fiction book, but I wept while reading this -- tears of sheer joy of appreciating a brilliant mind. Should be required reading for all social scientists.

In one of the most profoundly affecting social science books I have read, Kathleen Stewart adopts a radical and poetic language to summon up the inarticulacies of people in a world got down. In an environment surrounded by ghosts, lost hopes and debris from other times, the denizens of this space manufacture tales, phantasmogoric stories which conjure up powerful forces beyond their control. It is through these stories that they try to gain possession of their own lives and environment in a capitalist America which systematically disempowers and uses up people and resources.

By avoiding leftist reified and conservative discourse, the impact of these forces on ordinary people is relayed in a humane and grounded fashion, devoid of meta-theoretical abstractions, which preserves their dignity and shares their insights. Kathleen's imaginative and empathetic approach cannot be too highly commended, for it is this which ultimately provokes an anger that working people should be treated with such disdain, by middle class academics as well as by capital.

As a West Virginian and an aspiring anthropologist, I was extremely disturbed by Stewart's approach to her subjects. I understand her impulse to write reflexively and her reluctance to impose meaning, but by allowing the text to be consumed by quasi-philosophical meanderings instead of communicating some concrete sense about her subjects, their way of life, and her relationships with them, Stewart does the people she claims to respect a great disservice. It's as though she's using them in the name of a broader academic mission, rather than concentrating on their experience itself.

When you describe people as living in a 'phantasmogoric dreamworld' and 'an alternative narrative space,' you are assigning another KIND of meaning -- one even more problematic than that of more traditional approaches. In the end, the book creates more distance between the reader and rural West Virginians than had previously existed. Kathleen Stewart may well believe that this is the role or the inevitable outcome of ethnography. If so, I hope she'll stay the hell away from my home state.

This book drifts back and forth with no solid foundation. It seems as if the author can't make up his mind--which seems to set the book back at times--with the proper editing I believe this book my begin and finish some sort of consolidated theme.

There is much fluff and little substance. This book is not a good read.

I was let down by this book. The title drew me in but the content was a big disappointment.

Professor Varano's book is insightful, interesting, and analytically sound. His work in Forced Choices sheds light on the complex dynamics involved in the social, economic, and political life of a small community undergoing structural and cultural changes. He does a superb job in bringing into life the contradictions and ironies of these dynamics through the richness of ethnographic research and the potential of sociological analysis. Great book for work and organizations, industrial sociology, labor studies, and stratification.

Taking the reader inside the steelmill town of Weirton, West Virginia, Professor Varano provides an engaging, indepth examination of employee ownership. Through personal accounts of employees, management, "facilitators", and other citizens, one is drawn into the "battle" that ensues as a company undergoes change. Varano's analysis of this change presents sociological concepts in a MUCH more interesting fashion than is found in the usual sterile textbook.

Fading into the indistinct memory of collective American consciousness the tragedy of American lynching is brought once again into a stark and repulsive focus with W. Fitzhugh Brundage's Lynching the in the New South. As Brundage quickly points out in his introduction, for better than a quarter of the history of the United States our great national crime was lynching. This was not the vaguely socially approved antiseptic lynching of Hollywood western films, where criminals met their just fate at the hands of an outraged public without recourse to sparse legal instruments, but the mob violence of the American South directed against African Americans in the post- reconstruction era. In this book Brundage rips the blinders off and exposes before the reader the stomach turning savagery of American racism.
While this is not a new topic in academia, within the comfortable discipline of history it has been largely overlooked. Because of this Brundage is plowing new fields previously only tilled by social scientists attempting to explain "why." Brundage takes their works and using historical methods adds significant depth to the older analysis. One statistic will suffice to illustrate why his study is critical to an American historian. Our "popular" image of lynching is skewed. Between 1880 and 1930 there were 447 whites and 38 blacks lynched in the American West. This is the basis upon which the movie makers have built their image. In the same timeframe , largely ignored, 732 whites and 3,220 blacks were lynched in the American South.
In turning to this dark topic Brundage attempts to answer three basic questions. First, how can the variations in mob violence over time and space be explained? Second, to what extent was lynching a social ritual that affirmed traditional values? And finally, what were the causes of the decline of lynching? (pgs. 15-16) in my opinion Brundage answered the mail on all three of the these questions.
Brundage was, at the time of publication, an assistant professor of history at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. His undergraduate degree is from the University of Chicago while his doctorate is from Harvard.
Brundage has organized the book topically rather than chronologically. This suits his intended goals well by allowing him to proceed in a logical manner from catagorization of the phenomena through application of his catagories to the regional examples and finally to explanation of his various conclusions. In his opening chapters he does a marvelous job explaining the social and cultural factors that applied in the American south, and how they contributed to the tragedy. Brundage demonstrates how a "culture of violence" existed in the post-reconstruction South which itself derived from the slavery that preceeded. He goes on to explain how various factors such as the southern "sense of honor" and to a lesser degree economic issues contributed to the severity of the problem.
One of the great strengths of this book is the strong analytic content of the initial chapters. Brundage gives names to phenomena which allows for a better understanding as the text moves through time and space. In one interesting section he identifies the various types of mobs that conduct violence, there are "mass mobs," "terrorist mobs," "private mobs" and "posses." Yet he accomplishes this without losing touch with the fact that this was at all times a very human event. Something which many social scientists seem sometimes to overlook. Brundage never lets you escape the stare of the victim, as he liberally salts the text with vignette after vignette.
In his later analysis of the regional differences in lynching, using his case study states of Virgina and Georgia, Brundage comes full circle. What originates as almost social science analysis returns to firm ground in solid historical analysis. This book is scrupulously researched and amply footnoted. In his use of sources Brudage was cautious, as well he should be since the majority of the sources (primarily newspapers) were either racially condescending or virulent in their opposition. Neither outlook is prone to creating a reliable and unadulterated recitation of the facts of any given event. For all that, Brundage manages to walk the fine line very well, neither appearing overtly partisan nor hiding behind the biases of the sources. What emerges is a balanced account of an American holocaust.
If there are any weaknesses in this work it might be in the almost oppressive use of vignettes. It is almost as though he is pandering to the base instinct of voyerism of violence that makes some other fields of history so popular with the masses even as it is rejected by the profession. (Think "Guns and Trumpets" military history, or for that matter, think of the entire History Channel!) Yet in going back through the text after identifying this fault I could not find a single extraneous example. In each case he is using a vignette for a solid purpose, to illustrate some nuance of the phenomena. My only other complaint deals with his final goal, to understand why lynching passed from the American scene. In this I believe that while he did a great job explaining how it happened, I think that his explanations of "why" are a little too open-ended. Of course, as he himself conceded at the outset, this is really only the first (historical) book on the topic and therefore there is room for much more scholarship in the field.

I read Brundage's book in a graduate seminar which dealt with the history of the South in the twentieth century. Researching the practice of lynching in the South can be a very evasive and hard-to-document subject but Brundage effectively overcomes this hurdle with the most obvious and informative mediums, newspapers and eyewitness accounts. His strategy of classifying the various modes of lynching and the accompanying use of graphs and charts further drives home his thesis. The book clearly gives the reader a dark, yet illuminating look into this extralegal practice. The only reason why I couldn't give the book a 5-star rating is the geographic limitations of the book. True, Georgia and Virginia represent two extremes in the numbers of lynching and offer an interesting contrast. Maybe I was looking for a broader approach to his comparison. Overall, a very well-researched and informative read.

I'm always interested in the modern tendancy to bury the South under a load of obloquy and falsehood, and this book carries out that tendancy with a vengance under the guise of objective scholarship. The author says nothing about the lynchings that took place in northern states (there were plenty of them, and in fact some of the most famous lynching photos were taken in northern states), and the author fails to place violence against blacks into any sort context or proportion. For example, the author fails to point out that there are usually more black-on-black murders in one year than there were lynchings of blacks in 86 years of record keeping on the subject. The incredibly narrow focus of the author calls the book's credibility into serious question.

This book is practically useless. It does have value in showing the depths to which anti-South bigots will go to try to deflect attention from the very real and rampant racism in the northern states. Don't waste your time or money on this bigotry.

I am a Civil War historian, who has seen his share of novels based on the Civil War. It is beyond comprehension that Joe B. Roles claims that this novel is based on a true story. The historical inaccuracies are frequent and significant; it's surprising he even knows the war was in the 1800's. The plot is tired; it's creativity could probably be bested by a typical high school student. When you quickly give up on enjoying the plot of this book, it is in fact possible to enjoy the many grammatical errors -- at least for a short while, until you realize how sad it is that Joe B. Roles found a publisher for this work. Real writers remain unpublished, while this amateurish effort wastes paper. Don't waste your time.

I cannot believe that the New York PhD reviewer read the same book that I did. This book has a story that is fun to read. I read it cover to cover in one evening and I know first hand the areas where this took place. Will I vouch that all the content is authentic? Of couse not.
I am a professor in Kentucky. I know a lot of U.S. and international history but am no expert as the New York PhD claims to be in his review. But when I eat salsa (get a rope) or read a book I know what I like. This book is worth reading

This little historical novel is based on a story known to many people of Monroe County West Virginia. Simply told, it describes rural life in the 1860s in a county bordering the state of Virginia along the Alleghany Mountains. Loyalty to Virginia and neighbors was torn apart by the struggle of this civil war. Unpretensiously written, it recalls those names of townships, and families, now gone. This is an "easy read" which encourages history buffs to read more about this historical time in our country.
J. M. Hazelton

I find the organization of this book very poor. Monongahela Forest is divided by Ranger Stations. It would be more helpful if it were organized by county or region, rather than technical designations (State forest, County park, etc.). It is not for the casual hiker at all.

If I were to choose one word to sum up this book, it would be "quantity." Allen states that he describes over 500 trails, and though I did not count them, that number sounds about right. Trail length ranges from about 1 mile to overnight backpack trips. Some background information is provided for each area, and a brief trail description (usually one paragraph) is provided. Maps are provided for the national forest lands (about half the hikes) but not for state parks or other land. The book is pocket-sized so that it can be carried easily on hikes. No matter how much hiking you have done in West Virginia, you will certainly find some destination in here you have not been.

Unfortunately, to fit 500 trails into 350 pages, something has to be omitted, and in this case what is omitted is details. I already mentioned the lack of maps, but many of the trail descriptions are nothing more than directions for walking. Few insights are given as to what will be seen on the trail. This lack of detail combined with a lack of trail summary (a table listing all the trails in the book) make it very hard to choose a trail to hike.

In summary, if you are looking for a comprehensive trail guide to the state of West Virginia, this is definitely the book for you. If you are looking for the best hiking West Virginia has to offer, this guide will help only slightly. Despite its shortcomings, this is still the best guide to West Virginia hiking on the market. It should be considered by those planning a hiking trip to the Mountain state.

This book has excellent information on a large number of trails in the Mountain State. The descriptions are detailed and, on the trails I followed, are very accurate. However, little attention is paid to summit data such as elevations, directions for side trips to reach summits, etc. As a person who is interested in "peak bagging", I was somewhat disappointed. There are about 173 summits in West Virginia over 4,000 feet and there is almost no reference to this attribute. This book is essential and has a tremendous amount of useful information, but does not go far enough.

I was extremely disappointed in this book. It offers very few ghost tales and the stories related were basicallt uninteristing to me. The author presumes to be a Chaucer, relating "Canterbury Tales." I would suggest not wasting yout time on this one!

My grandson wanted this book so I bought it for him. He is quite happy with it so I rate an A+A+

Totally useless. I threw it in the trash two hours after I received it.
Known mines in the Georgia Area were missing.
Very incomplete.

This book looks like it's going to be a GREAT asset in my mineral hunting! I like the way it's set up, by state and then by county within the state. It lists the various sites, tells what has been found at each site and (by a code explained in the front of the book) where in each site the minerals were (in a field, in a mine, in the water, etc.). I have to say, there are places here I had absolutely NO IDEA were so close to me, and in one site where I've been prospecting, it lists at least 12 other places nearby that I knew nothing about!

There are directions of varying degrees to each site. That's the one thing I'd quibble about -- some of the directions aren't that precise. But I understand that some of these sites are private lands, or not completely documented, and he can't come out and say, "Go fifty feet past the blue house, down a ravine, and to your left." In general, the directions seem good enough to get you close, and after that it's up to you.

He lists the rocks and minerals found at each site and gives some information about the quality at most places, including size of crystals found, color (and quality of color), and so on.

My only regret? I don't know if I'll have time to visit each site he has listed! So many rocks, so little time........

Part of the book is true.I have done a lot of research on this story.The same story was published 4 years before this was to of happened.Author has taken a folk tale and made a fortune by telling half truths.I am his great nephew.I have records to back this up.

This is one of the most interesting accounts of a local legend that I've ever read. Lyle's explanation of what probably happened is brilliant. A great read.

We borrowed this book from a friend and used it on our trip with great success. The unique graphics (Aerial Photos and simplified rock face topos) make deciphering approaches easy and route finding pretty simple. The star ratings were dead on and we enjoyed the climbs immensely. I was able to hand the book to a novice and ask them to tell me where we needed to go, what we needed to take, and they were quickly able to answer. All bolt counts for our routes were spot on as well.

I'm not very impressed by this updated guidebook. While the new guidebook does include the Meadow river climbing areas (incredible climbing there), it's hardly an improvement over the contents of the old version. Very brief descriptions, inexact topos, but worst of all mistakes from the last version are still present in this book. On a trip to Fern Buttress my friend and I found inaccurate bolt counts as well as incorrect grades for more than one route. My suggestion is that if you have the older version, don't bother with buying this unless you plan to visit the Meadow river.