West Virginia Books

I bought this book out of my love for railroad history and West Virginia history and when I can combine the two I am usually very happy.

I like this book in that it contains the facts to a very fine degree. I have two complaints though. The first is that it is like reading a time line. Rarely are two consecutive paragraphs related. The facts and events are relayed very well this way but it makes for very dry reading at times.

My second complaint is that the maps and photographs are extremely small all through the book. It is very difficult to study and enjoy a map of an entire rail line when the map is only about 2" x 2" in the text.

All in all, I did enjoy the book. I would recommend buying it, just keep a magnifying glass at your side for the photos and maps.

I thought that I had either heard of or visited all of the quirky places within the State of West Virginia! Wow was I wrong!

Most of my family comes from this wild wonderful State so I'm always reading books about traveling throughout the State.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is looking for something different for a vacation or weekend getaway. With this book, you can plan to explore a section of the State and find those quaint and eccentric parts that make up Americana.

A long read, and a true history of the state. Whatever your background, If you like West Virginia, then this book is for you.

Lavishly illustrated with many colour maps and photos of ancient items, the book strives to hold the reader's attention. Not that the text is neglected, of course. The authors explain in straightforward fashion the development of the ancient civilisations of the Middle East and Europe.

We see the rise of Greece and Rome, in more detail than the descriptions of Mesopotamia or Egypt. But in the limited space available, perhaps this was inevitable.

The later chapters focus on western and southern Europe. Relatively little discussion of Moscovy or indeed eastern Europe in general.

This book offers an amazing look at California through a totally different lens of gender and sexuality.
I was born and raised in California and am now a fourth grade teacher in California where I teach California state history.
As a California native, I found this book gave me many interesting details about how I ended up here. As a teacher, I found this book gave me a wider perspective as to what really has happened here in the Golden State.

Colored People is a wonderful book. It has humor, sadness and illuminates a specific period of time. I liked how his family and town shaped his values and made him what he is today. We are using this book as a Common Reading and also a One Book, One Community Program with the small university town of Shepherdstown. The author is coming and will meet the students who will have all read the book. The topic of race and the civil rights movement are highlighted and will be the topic of many discussions. I highly recommend the book. You will enjoy reading it and if you learn from it, so much the better.

An informative, interesting look into the attitudes, situations, and resoucefulness of "Colored People". Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a gifted and sensitive leader of thought and expression of our day.

I place Colored People alongside Angela's Ashes as one of the best works of memoir in recent years. He doesn't moralize; he just tells the honest story. This is a story that, to my knowledge, has not been told elsewhere. It is a story about the freedom and comfort and the pain of a segregated commuinty, and the heartbreak that came with leaving some of that world behind. Most things are deeper and more complex than we like to think they are. Colored People brings that concept forward in a way that no other book has. The people whose expressed frustration with not being able to keep the characters straight are missing the point - this isn't a murder mystery and it doesn't make any difference. Buy it. Read it. Share it. I only wish I'd done so when it first came out.

Gates fears that Piedmont, West Virginia will cease to exist. His father felt and instructed him that people of the same race should not cling to each other through habit or fear. The author rebels at the notion that he can't be part of other groups, too. Piedmont is in Mineral county. Piedmont as a whole seems to be graying. The town's identity was bound up by the existence of the Westvaco paper mill. Almost all the colored people in Piedmont worked at the paper mill. Until the 1970's the houses were rented from white landowners.

The civil rights era came late to Piedmont. The family watched Dr. King on the news. The author's father was jaundiced about the civil rights movement. His mother was courageous. She sent four brothers to college and was recognized on "The Big Pay-Off". Through his mother, Gates was part of the Coleman clan, a big deal in Piedmont. The Gateses lived in Cumberland. Brown v. Board of Education marked the author and his peers for life. Integration brought interesting cultural clashes.

Gates was marked out to excel from first grade. Gateses had been attending Howard for three generations and Harvard for two. The family, in the beginning, went to the Walden Methodist Church. Gates was afraid of the power of the Holiness Church and he avoided it. His mother became depressed with the change of life when the author was twelve and she was forty six. The mother became a pack rat after a childhood of scarcity. Gates began to cook dinner for the family and he joined the church in his anxiety. A childhood friend urged him to read Dickens and he became a fervid reader. He attended an Episcopal church camp in West Virginia, Peterkin, in 1965. He thought it was like stepping into a dream world. He read NOTES OF A NATIVE SON. For some of the older people in Piedmont integration was experienced as a loss. Gates went to Potomac State for one year and applied for a transfer. He was admitted to Yale.

This is a lovely portrait of a community and a people.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is an extraordinary scholar, particularly on African-American issues. He was born and raised in Piedmont, West Virginia during the time of early racial desegregation and, as a black man, was directly influenced by this dramatically historical period. Gates graduated summa cum laude from Yale University with a degree in history, then received a Ph.D. in English from Cambridge.
He has written for The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Time, The New Republic, and other prominent magazines. In addition to Colored People: A Memoir, Gates has authored and co-authored several books including Figures in Black: Works, Signs, and the "Racial" Self (1987), The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (1988), and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (1997).

The preface to Colored People is a letter from Gates to his daughters, Maggie and Liza and, though the book is dedicated to his father Henry Louis Gates, Sr. and in memory of his mother Pauline Augusta Coleman Gates, the entire autobiography is written in conversational tone, as if Gates were recounting his stories not only to his daughters, but to their entire generation.

Gates' collection of memories describes the era, long since past (both for good and for bad) when blacks and whites were segregated, and the subsequent integration of these colors, and what it was like to live in that world, and be a part of it's evolution. The title Colored People is beautifully appropriate, not only for the shades of black America it represents, but for each and every one of us; black, white, red, yellow: none of us are see-through.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. invites us to live with him in Piedmont, West Virginia, and experience life-black life-through his eyes. We walk through his town, invade his cultural rituals as a welcome guest, experience the love of family and community with him, and suffer the pain and frustration of segregation alongside him. I felt privileged to walk with Gates into segregated, comfortable, welcoming, "safe" black cultural spaces I could never enter otherwise: a black funeral, a black church, a black barbershop, a black family reunion. In contrast, I felt anger and pain at being judged, criticized, and belittled because of skin color.

Gates emphasizes to his readers, through his personal life experiences, the fact that color is only an outside condition that changes with the sunshine. He allows us to see that we are all human beings first, experiencing the same emotions, passions and ambitions as the man next to us, regardless of his color.

He doesn't discount white racism though, nor try to "Uncle Tom" it into something to be scoffed at as negligible. He allows us to know what West Virginia was like in the 1950's through the eyes of a young black man. We feel his warm acceptance when he falls for the affections of a white girl, and when he is recognized for superior intellect among his peers, many of whom are white. We share in the camaraderie he feels when he plays ball with his white friends. But then we are appalled when he is forced to leave the company of their table in a restaurant and stand at the counter, because of his skin color. We get angry because those same white friends don't stick up for him when he is forcibly thrown from a dance club, simply because he is black.

Through both the segregation and integration, Gates shares with us what he finds to be of greatest value in his life; that being the love of his family. His memoir is somewhat biographical in this sense, in that the lives of his maternal family, the Colemans, and his paternal family, the Gateses, are shared with us in detail. We learn how Henry Louis Gates, Jr. found the support and strength to become the intellectual force he is today. Through the lives of his family members, we see yet another generation of segregated black America. We learn what it is like to be "kept down" in a dead-end mill job, to be forced to drink from a separate water fountain, to be drawn into a box and dared to cross its lines.

Through the Colemans and the Gateses we experience the freedom of integration, but also the fear and uncertainty of leaving behind a safe and comfortable life we have come to accept, if not love. There is fear and discomfort in change, and we dread its revolution, even as we feel its excitement, through Gates' memories.

Gates' optimistic personality shines throughout his book. It's refreshing to me that, despite his formidable education and vast first-hand knowledge of racism, segregation and integration, his autobiography is not written in lofty, scholarly terminology, but in an easy, relaxed manner that informs, educates and leaves the reader with the impression of having enjoyed a talk with a good friend.

Colored People: A Memoir is a text which, in my opinion, should be a part of every student's university curriculum. Gates' underlying message, that freedom should never be taken for granted, is one that should be ingrained in every American citizen, regardless of color or creed. His personal memoirs, one West Virginia man's record of an era, offer a candid glimpse into the trails of integration few of us today, thankfully, will ever experience. This book is not to be missed by anyone who cares about history, about race, and about multicultural America as we now know it and how it came to be.

Rhonda Browning White

This book is actually for preteens but I was required to read it for a class. I loved it so much I ended up rereading it with my 10-year-old son. This book is an amazing story and teaches lots of life lessons.It is about dealing with grief, treasuring life and making unexpected friends.

This book is about great love and the great sorrow when an elderly person dies. Summer was an orphan whose parents died in a great flood. For years, she bounced from home to home, no relative really wanting her. Then she meets her Uncle Ob and Aunt May. They are elderly, poor and not in the best of health. Yet, they are overflowing with love, so they take her in and raise her with what they have.
Suddenly, May dies and Summer and Ob are distraught. Ob has lost the will to live and Summer does not know what to do. A neighbor boy named Cletus comes into their lives and talks about a church run by a spiritualist medium and they decide to visit her and also tour the West Virginia capitol city. When they arrive, they discover that the medium has joined the spirit world, so in a depressed state, they turn back for home.
However, Ob suddenly turns around and they visit the capitol building. The splendor uplifts their spirits and when they arrive home, Summer is overcome by crying and Ob holds her tight. This brings his spirit back and the next day Ob is once again full of life. The book closes with a very touching letter to Summer from May about how they always felt that their poverty kept them from giving Summer all she needed.
If they are lucky, children will suffer the loss of someone who gave them the amount of love and dedication Summer experienced. At that time, they must cope with it and this book will help ease that pain.

This book really rubbed me the wrong way. I understand the need to talk about death with kids, but I feel that there are other books that do a better job.

Missing May spends too much time talking about "the spirit world" and not necessarily about whether things are going to work out for Summer. It seems like Ob is toast from the start and that Summer is going to have to fend for herself. Ob is so depressed about the loss of his wife that he about dies from it. Yet, he is somehow rejuvenated by a wacky kid named Cletus who carries around a suitcase full of pictures that he's collected over the years.

This is a real sad story about how Ob is so determined to be with or talk to his poor old May that he, Summer, and Cletus set out on a journey to find a mystic preacher who supposedly can communicate with the dead. I'm not going to argue about how this book was written because I think it was fairly decent. However, I do have an argument with how this author goes about explaining death in a very obscure way to an assumed young audience. My personal beliefs have me torn on the issue of teaching kids about spirits, ghosts, and contacting the departed this side of the grave. All of that would sound confusing to most kids and perhaps even frightening.

If you are going to tell a story about losing a loved one to death, then you really need to explain a few things. When someone dies they go to another place. People that physically die can live inside our hearts and minds as we remember the times that are spent with them. Also, the author needs convey that some sense of comfort will be given for those left behind. You may choose whether it is proper to talk about heaven and hell depending on your audience, but these are real places and we shouldn't kid with our children on these matters. Parents should go into more detail with their children regarding death because it is more of a religious matter.

If you are one that doesn't want to favor any particular religion but wants to help kids better understand death try reading "Come Again in the Spring" by Richard Kennedy or "The Fall of Freddie the Leaf" by Leo Buscaglia. These books will at least help children understand WHY people die. In regards to WHERE we go when we die, this should be a parent's responsibility to explain.

This story is about a young girl who loses the closest thing she had to a mother and how she grieves. The book is very well written, obviously, as it is a Newberry winner. It really shows the stages of emotion that Summer, the main character goes through and helps children to understand how to hang on to hope. For children that do not have many ideas about death, the book may seem pretty uneventful since a lot of the pages are simply filled with Summer's thoughts about losing May. For children that maybe have experienced a loss and are ready to grieve or children that want to know more or are concerned about death (which they do need to learn about sometime), this book is a beautiful story about accepting loss and choosing to live life day by day, knowing you will keep the memories, but that not all hope is lost.

The title of this book is Missing May. This book takes place in West Virginia in the mountains. The characters live in a trailer. The main characters are May, Ob, Cleatus, and Summer. In this story Summer's parents die.
Summer gets passed from aunt to aunt. Then finally Ob and May took her. Then May died in her garden.
Ob and Summer had a hard time dealing with May's death.
summer thought that Ob would die too. Summer's friend Cleatus had came to live with Ob and Summer. I would give this book four out of five stars because it was a little bit confusing but evrything else it was great. I recommend people who like hard but also kinda easy books to read Missing May.

This is an amazing inside view of the Israeli nation. R. J. Cramer revisited the land after decades and describes the change in mood and spirit its people have undergone. Many may think of this report as an overly clinical assessment, which is one-sided and too liberal, but I found it informative in many different aspects just the same. It describes the disillusionment present among its various groups as well as among American Jews and the decline of past nobility and naive idealism of how Israel "ought to be". He is critical of Ehud Barak's settlement offer to Arafat at the Camp David Conference in 2000 and describes it as euphemistic and unacceptable. He speaks of the poverty rate among the Palestinians living in a land dissected by settlements, highways and checkpoints. With equal cynicism he mentions "the gaggle of thugs and thieves" Arafat brought back from Tunisia. Intriguing is his description of the different Israeli population groups or "tribes", as he call them, who live in sequestered communities and neither speak with nor understand one another. The reader learns about those who do most of the manual work, those who run the show, those who are the "tanks-and-torah hardliners", and those who "free-load off the state". Cramer's description of the Arab concept of a "sulha" mediator and his task of restoring the all-important honor of an Arab's family and tribe is most instructive in understanding the mindset of the Arabs in this conflict. There is a raft of further lessons the non-Israeli reader learns from this book.

I am certain there are more loving and laudatory accounts of that land and it has generated lively disagreement, but it is obvious that here is an author who did no more than consider, with deep concern, the challenges and problems faced by his own people.

I purcahsed this book for my father. He is very into Zionism and the history of Israel. He said that the book was very well written and that he really enjoyed it!

I bought this book with an open mind, and was sorely disappointed. The author is so nasty toward Judaism and Jewish pride. The whole book is filled with cynicism and anger. My advice: Don't waste your time or money on this.

If you're curious but uninformed and want to understand the Israel-Palestinian conflict, this is a good book for you. Along the way to understanding what drives some of the issues in the West Bank and Gaza, Ben Cramer will have you laughing out loud (and crying sometimes) with some wonderful little stories that help illustrate his points. In fact, given the seriousness of the topic, you may be caught offguard early in the book by some of his offhandedness. I found myself rereading passages, thinking "does he really mean what he's saying". But once I realized he intended to inject some lightheartedness into the subject, then I relaxed and really enjoyed the book.

I borrowed this book first from the library and liked it so much, I bought one on Amazon.

For everyone who is tired of the polarised
nature of the Middle East question this book
(written by a Jewish American) is a superb antidote.

--a) Its very easy to read - nice style and "un-put-downable".
--b) It takes the discussion up to the level of human beings
- their issues, their lives, their wants. He humanises
the whole debate like no other text on the issue.
--c) Outlining his thesis via the narrative of individual
lives is an innovative and highly successful technique.
He does a great job of weaving those stories together
to come up with a coherent work.
--d) You end up liking people on both sides - wow!
--e) He is very realistic and straight talking - something
that is missing from the debate. Makes his work have a
real razor sharp cut. No BS.
--f) He introduces new insight and ideas not seen
else where (the Secular Russification of the Israeli
Population).
--g) The quality of the paper and the interesting ribbed
effect created by the paper edges gives it quite an unusual
touch. A good one for you book anoraks.

An outstanding human artefact that will take you through the
depths of human depravity and its most honourable moments.

Ultimately it will leave you with a wider perspective on the
subject and fill you with hope.

Ben Cramer - we honour you for this service to humanity.

Mia leaves her element of being a princess in NYC and goes to help build houses for the rural poor, hopefully discovering a secret and useful talent, and make-out with her boyfriend. Very short novella that is meaningful, humorous, and lovely. Grade: A-

Project Princess is a fun, short addition to the Princess Diaries series. This books details Mia's spring break spent building homes for the less fortunate. Project Princess goes by pretty fast that by the time you get into it, the book is over. Anyone who wants to read the entire series should just read it and then move on to the later installments.

It was good but not as good as her other books. A very quick read but I should have only paid a couple of dollars for it not 5.00.

It was her same style but very short.

This book was okay. Very short, easy to read. It covers what Mia is doing on her spring break and how she has a hard time adapting to the wilderness because she is a city girl.
But I think she's gotta get used to it, if she wants to save the whales or whatever.
But it's only fifty pages, and you should read it because after all you gotta take the good with the bad and if you loved her other novels you should try to keep up.

My daughter will love this book as she does all the Princess Diaries collection, but I am shocked I paid $5 for this book when the book comes with a *star* stating $2.99. I feel I may have gotten jipped!

As a side note, this is a great series for any young girl to read.

When I finished John Henry Days I felt that I wanted to know more about the title character. The most interesting chapters in this book were the historical ones. What was John Henry really like, what about Lil Bob, was John Henry's wife really Polly? The excerpt on Paul Robeson was also interesting. As for J., I too like Pamela was wondering what the J stands for?

I had to read this for a class. I just could not get into this story. I normally love to read but this book just could not cut it. I would not continue reading this book by choice. I will be glad to be done with it. The instructor could have picked a better book. No one else in the class cares for this book either. A waste of my money. J. is an annoying character. Couldn't care less about him....

Grandiose undertaking presented in a convoluted epic of a story. Whitehead writes parallel stories that engage and is presented in a straight-forward, albiet alternating fashion, until about half-way through the novel, where it seems he loses focus or becomes bored and starts interjecting a series of new sub-plots in alternating seccession in the guise of a contributing back-story, but in reality this takes away from the main story. Once it's over, a feeling of importance permeates, but for all the loose ends this feeling is diminished a bit.

JHD is too long, and it sometimes takes too much of a byroad to return to the main narrative. There is much beauty in those byways, but by the time you get back to J. and Pamela, you feel you've travelled too far to be happy about your return, and the two characters don't grip you like they could or should. What made The Intuitionist such a great book - the detailled accounts - is this novel's main flaw.

This is good too, although it took me a long time to actually finish it. It sat on the desk beside my bed for a few months, and, despite my best intentions, I read a few different books during that time while slightly avoiding this one. This one is a bit long, and at times I wondered if he's the sort of writer that people like to own more than they like to read.

But still, Whitehead is a force to be reckoned with. He writes like a white guy. There, I said it. More like Updike than Baldwin. That's what the hype is about. He's obviously a well read, educated brother that knows how to put words together. He throws up a fractured prism of thought and feedback and current from our culture. The result is quite interesting, although I'm sure this is not for everybody.