Kentucky Books

If you've ever wanted to reach right into the movie screen, shake one of Woody Allen's characters by the shirt collar, and say, "Snap out of it, bub," here's a book for you. Peter J. Bailey's The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen offers a fascinating, crystalline analysis of one of the most vexing questions to dog three generations of Woody Allen characters: Is the fictional world of art--especially film art--more a help or a hindrance in our difficult lives?

Bailey, an English professor at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., demonstrated his gift for making sense of challenging contemporary literary art with Reading Stanley Elkin in the mid-'80s. In The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen, he takes on a more readily accessible subject but does not hold back any of the tremendous critical insight at his command. The result is a book both for serious film buffs--that is, buffs of serious film (a subjective distinction taken up in this book)--and for film scholars alike. I was impressed by Bailey's scholarly precision, yet after reading the first couple of chapters I wanted to dash out and rent Stardust Memories, Manhattan, and several other signature Woody Allen flicks. This book has actually made watching his movies a more intellectually stimulating experience without killing the comic moments so abundant in them.

A college English instructor myself, I appreciate the challenge of leading a critical investigation of something fun and entertaining without making that subject, well, less fun and entertaining. Bailey succeeds admirably with this book, mainly because he never puts Allen on a pedestal. The author is a fan, to be sure, as indicated by his generous praise for what Allen does well--and has done well at a pace of roughly one film a year since 1972. This book's thesis, however, delves more deeply into a particularly compelling set of questions at the core of most of Allen's films: What do they say about the role of art in our lives? Is it a redeeming social force or merely a pleasant diversion from life's suffering? Are Woody Allen's films art or merely pleasant, entertaining diversions?

Bailey combines his own convincing interpretations of Allen's film work with previously reported comments from Allen on these questions to show not only how equivocal Woody Allen movies are on the matter of art's benefits and costs, but how central a theme this equivocating is in those movies. To his great credit--and unlike many scholarly investigations of film and literary art--Bailey avoids overbearing suggestions that HIS interpretations are REALLY what Allen's films are all about. Rather, the author has found a thread running through Allen's work that he holds up to the light--a light that has lingered too long on the personality of Woody Allen and the attending tabloid drama. This more illuminating thread--the vexed relationship of art to life and the difficulty of reconciling the two, both in art and in life--is of such enormous importance in the broader conversation of American popular culture that the absence of details on Allen's personal travails reads as a virtue in Bailey's book.

While Woody Allen fans will definitely find The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen most enjoyable and accessible, any moviegoer who has ever contemplated what distinguishes the cinematic good and bad from the ugly will find this book thought-provoking, perhaps at times profound. Ultimately, this is not a portrait of a filmmaker so much as the study of an intriguing film mind at work--and a snapshot of a possible film legend as a work-in-progress.

Peter Baily establishes his thesis that a primary thread running through many of Allen's major films is an examination of the tension between art and life and the struggle of the artist to disengage from the real world to unleash the creative juices. Citing examples from many of my favorite Allen films and following through on his major premise Baily delivers a fine book that challenged me to look at this films from a new perspective. I highly recommend this to fans of Woody Allen. I am cueing up my DVD copy of Hannah and her Sisters as soon as I log off.

I have read several books on Woody Allen and this is the most brilliant so far. Those who are tired of hearing about his squabble with Mia Farrow will be relieved to find that the author concentrates on his work and only mentions facts of Woody Allen's life that are relevant to his films. The book painstakingly analyzes the psychological and philosophical undercurrents in Woody's work, and especially delves into the issue as to whether art cand lend coherence to an otherwise contingent and random life. It'll help you see Woody's films from a broader standpoint but also set you brooding over your life as well.

It's June of 1778, and thirteen-year-old Sarah Moore has been living with her relatives in Williamsburg for a year when she receives the news that her mother and new baby sister are seriously ill back home on the Kentucky frontier. Sarah immediately leaves Williamsburg to return home. When she arrives, she finds that their home has been burnt to the ground by Indians, her family is living at the fort, and her father and older brother have gone off to fight the Indians. Sarah must struggle with the challenges of living in this harsh frontier land, with the constant threat of Indian attacks and worry over her family.

Readers who enjoyed the previous two books about Sarah Moore will definitely want to read this one as well. Although the Sarah's Journey books are not among my top favorites, they are still sweet, well-written, and historically accurate stories that will most likely be enjoyed by young readers who enjoy historical fiction set in colonial and pioneer times. I particularly enjoyed the colonial frontier setting of this book and the first in the series. It's a setting I'd really like to see more of, as it combines my two favorite historical fiction topics, colonial times and pioneer life.

I read this book because my friends older sister said that it was a good book, it looked kinda spid, but I read it anyway I am sure glad I did read it was the best book! know I am looking to buy the other ones!

This book was wonderful! Wanda Luttrell writes as if she were really there. she writes with all the things that make a book interesting, suspense, danger, and problems that make this book hard to put down! Sarah is a young girl that is moving back to Kentuckey from Williamsburg to be with her sick mother.While she is there, she is asked to find a friend's family. The novel takes you through the chalanges Sarah faces all along the way. If you like historical fiction, than you will love Wanda Luttrell's "Stranger in Williamsburg".

Secret Recipe is a book that offers a good, historical breakdown of the Kentucky Fried Chicken company and the individuals who built the restaurant into the thriving business that it remains today. Darden tries to cover all the important bases, from the original restaurant that opened in Corbin, Kentucky, all the way to the present day business, owned and operating by Tricon, Inc.

I really enjoyed all the facts that this book contains. Until I read this book, I did not know that it was Pete Harman who thought of the name, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and I didn't know that Harman dreamed up the idea of selling buckets of chicken. Like most people, I assumed that the Colonel himself deserved credit for these business discoveries. After reading about the naming of the restaurant, I sure am glad that Harman had the necessary business sense to reject the restaurant name "Utah Chicken". It just doesn't sound right. It makes about as much sense as the "Utah Jazz". This is just oen of many facts discussed in this book.

Throughout the pages of this book, the author includes important quotes that are highlighted in a gray box, set aside from the regular text. There are also a few lists of facts here and there such as "Early Franchise Holders" and "The Colonel's Appearances on Television". You can also find text boxes on many pages titled "Pete's Words of Wisdom", which include quotes from Harman on successful restaurant operation.

One other important note to make about this book is that it was written as a historical summary of the KFC business as a whole. It isn't a biographical sketch of Colonel Sanders. Author Robert Darden does make frequent mention of the Colonel, as he should. But there's just as much coverage given to Pete Harman and other people who were instrumental to the success of this business.

Colonel Sanders has been gone now for more than two decades. Much of his original vision of what a restaurant should be has changed over the years. Even the name of the restaurant has changed from Kentucky Fried Chicken to the abbreviated KFC. But one thing that hasn't gone by the wayside is the image of Colonel Sanders. His familiar, smiling face remains a part of the KFC restaurant chain and is displayed on KFC merchandise and around each KFC store unit. It's a tribute to the man and the legend known as Colonel Harland Sanders. His finger lickin' good original recipe of herbs and spices has satisfied chicken lovers all over the world for more than half a century. And this book is equally satisfying, full of trivia and historical accounts of the KFC company and its rise to the top of its restaurant class.

This book provides great insight into the real story behind KFC. Especially entertaining for those that are familiar with KFC, the organization, the franchises, and the restaurant business. Goes into the philosophies of Pete Harman, the first, biggest and most influencial franchisee. Talks alot about the company, the growth, the growing pains, and what made the company successful.

KFC has a great history and its development is a wonderful addition to any study of the fast food industry. I recommend this book in conjunction with Behind the Arches. For those who love the Colonel and want to learn more about the man, the myth, and the legend they can get it all here. The growth of the company and strategy for deployment are all clearly explained. IT is very well written and I enjoyed the anecdotes along the way.

Stephen D. Engle's Struggle for the Heartland takes the latest scholarship on "the campaigns from Fort Henry to Corinth" and ties the military, political, and social issues faced during the campaign into an efficient and readable discussion of these events. The book is an entry in the University of Nebraska Press' Great Campaigns of the Civil War series of books. The book covers the time frame of the military campaign from Fort Henry to Corinth, including the Battle of Shiloh. Rather than focusing solely on military events, however, Engle provides a large amount of coverage to social and political considerations as well. The result, then, is a balanced overview of a campaign in which there was a "struggle for the heartland" of the Confederacy.

Northern military planners saw the obvious routes of attack into the Confederate "heartland" region provided by the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. It was simply a matter of preparing the armies to move in this direction, at least according to timid, methodical minds such as Henry Halleck and Don Carlos Buell, the two department commanders in the west. Albert Sidney Johnston, the overall Confederate commander in the west, gave wide latitude to his subordinates. One of these, Bishop Polk, had become obsessed with defending Columbus, Kentucky along the Mississippi River and virtually ignored the forts on the Tennessee and Cumberland to the east, even though they were in his department. The Union preparation may have taken quite a long time if not for the aggressive nature of Halleck's then unknown subordinate Ulysses S. Grant. Grant was determined to take Forts Henry and Donelson, defenders of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, respectively. His movement south caught both Halleck and Buell somewhat by surprise. The end result was that Grant managed to take both forts and capture over 10,000 Southern prisoners while Halleck and Buell haggled over cooperating in the expedition. As Grant's Army of the Tennessee rested and refitted along the Tennessee River south of the now captured forts Buell was to march his army southwest to meet them. Continued arguments between Halleck and Buell coupled with Grant's complacency at his Pittsburg Landing camp almost ended in disaster at the Battle of Shiloh. While Buell slowly marched toward the Tennessee River, Johnston and his subordinates had been busy at Corinth trying to recover the large amount of territory lost to Grant at the forts. The Battle of Shiloh prematurely ended these hopes as Grant's army was able to recover from their shock at being attacked and hold on as Buell's Army of the Ohio reached the field of battle. Johnston was killed and Beauregard, his second in command, was forced to retreat to Corinth. At this point in the campaign, Henry Halleck managed to obtain sole command of the armies in the West, and he gathered the armies of Grant, Buell, and Pope (fresh off a victory at Island No. 10 on the Mississippi) for a laborious advance on Corinth, the most vital railroad crossing in the Confederacy. The ending to this large campaign was anticlimactic, as Beauregard was forced to retreat due to poor water and increasing sickness in his army. Halleck had taken Corinth and cleared the Confederate Heartland of Southern armies. These military campaigns had seen great change in the way the North would prosecute the war, with important consequences.


Engle focuses quite a lot of time and energy to explaining how the large increase in the amount of Confederate territory controlled by the Union led to changes in the initial "soft war" policy espoused by the Lincoln Administration. Before Grant sailed south on the Tennessee to assault Fort Henry, Union armies were typically restrained and respectful when it came to the treatment of Southern civilians. No one better personified this idea than the commanders currently in charge of Union affairs: George B. McClellan as General In Chief with Henry Halleck and Don Carlos Buell as department heads in the West. These men were all democrats, and they believed in a war that would not upset the status quo. In other words, they wanted to leave the slavery issue alone, instead trying to treat Southerners well and return their slaves in the hope that they would come quickly and quietly back into the Union. The campaigns from Fort Henry to Corinth showed that this soft war policy was not practical. Southerners continued to resist even when treated well, and guerilla forces sprung up where Confederate armies were unable to hold territory in a conventional manner. Soldiers from privates to generals also began to see the difference between poor white subsistence farmers and wealthy slave owners, eventually blaming the institution of slavery as the primary cause of the war. These troops began to resent orders such as Buell's General Orders 13a, which prevented foraging, returned runaway slaves, and otherwise treated Southerners with kid gloves. Men such as division commander Ormsby Mitchel began to take matters into their own hands, and eventually the government agreed with this "hard war" course of action. Ironically, writes Engle, the Union push into Confederate leaning western and central Tennessee only hastened the Union policy change. If Buell had instead invaded Unionist eastern Tennessee, per Lincoln's wishes, this soft war policy may have continued long past June 1862.


The Union war effort in the west was plagued with bickering among its top commanders, writes Engle. Partly to blame was the unwieldy command structure. Don Carlos Buell's Department of the Ohio and Henry Halleck's Department of Missouri joined together at the Tennessee River, precisely where the easiest avenue of attack into the Confederate Heartland was located. This naturally enough caused great friction between the two men, both of whom always proceeded cautiously and believed their own opinions were correct on military matters. McClellan and Lincoln did not help matters in Washington, instead simply ordering the two men to cooperate. While they bickered over who should move first and along what lines, Grant seized the initiative and moved, catching both men by surprise. Buell still refused to send much help and almost literally warned Halleck not to fail. Grant's attacks succeeded, and the next logical move was to concentrate on the Tennessee for a move against Corinth. This time Buell did finally move, but he managed to take his time. Luckily for Grant, Army of the Ohio division commander "Bull" Nelson marched forward rapidly and was available late on the first day at Shiloh. The command friction between these two men only ended when Halleck managed to persuade Lincoln and Secretary of War Stanton that the West needed one commander.


Halleck also had his problems with Grant. Grant's victories at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson made Halleck jealous, and he childishly reacted by removing Grant from command on trumped up charges of drunkenness and Grant's failure to be present with his army when the Confederates launched an attack at Fort Donelson. Lincoln and Halleck, impressed with the aggressive Grant, and especially when they considered the conservative Halleck and Buell, lost no time in forcing Halleck to reinstate Grant. After Shiloh, Halleck again removed Grant from command of the Army of the Tennessee, bumping him up to the meaningless and superfluous "second in command" position during the advance on Corinth. Despite these and other quarrels, the Northern armies were able to force the Confederates from a large portion of the territory they held at the beginning of 1862.


Much of the Southern failure to hold this territory has to do with Jefferson Davis' utter lack of concern for the West. The roots of this attitude can be traced to the appointment of Albert Sidney Johnston to command in the West. Johnston was Davis' friend, and Davis believed him to be the finest general the Confederacy had. Davis left Johnston with very little men and materiel to work with, and as a result he had far too few men with which to defend a far too long defense line running from the Appalachians to the Indian Territory. To make matters worse, says Engle, Johnston frequently gave his subordinates far too much latitude in defending their various districts. This came back to haunt Johnston when General Polk became obsessed with defending Columbus, Kentucky, spending very little time preparing Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. Grant's quick strike caught the Confederate generals by surprise as well, and Johnston decided not to fight for Fort Donelson, in effect abandoning middle Tennessee and the capital at Nashville. This loss of large amounts of territory shocked and angered many Southerners, and Davis finally consented to send Johnston reinforcements. Johnston and Beauregard attempted to regain the lost territory with a surprise attack at Shiloh and failed, costing Johnston his life in the process. Beauregard was subsequently unable to hold Corinth in the face of a large Union force, poor water, and increasing sickness in his command.


Despite these Union successes, the Northern Generals did not typically take the political concerns of the Lincoln Administration into account in their military planning. The main case in point for the time frame of this book, according to Engle, concerns Lincoln's desire to liberate Unionist leaning, mountainous eastern Tennessee from Confederate rule. Lincoln knew that this area centered on Knoxville, Tennessee would more readily come back into the Union than the other flatter, slave holding sections of the state. Buell repeatedly refused to advance in this direction (at the same time refusing to cooperate with Halleck), claiming bad roads and numerous other reasons for delay. Buell also clashed with the Lincoln appointed military Governor of Tennessee, Andrew Johnson. Johnson was a Radical Republican, and he wanted southerners punished for their treason. He and Buell held violently opposite views on the prosecution of the war, and they would clash for as long as Buell held command of the Army of the Ohio.

Struggle for the Heartland is one volume of many in the Great Campaigns of the Civil War Series, published by the University of Nebraska Press. Series editors Anne J. Bailey and Brooks Simpson write that the series "offers readers concise syntheses of the major campaigns of the war, reflecting the findings of recent scholarship. The series points to new ways of viewing military campaigns by looking beyond the battlefield and the headquarters tent to the wider political and social context within which these campaigns unfolded..." In addition to exploring strictly military events from February to June 1862 along the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Mississippi Rivers, Struggle for the Heartland takes a deeper look at the political and social issues as well, weaving all of these together into a cogent whole.

The eight maps are functional, but the battle maps do not add considerably to the discussion. The notes are mostly secondary sources, but in this case it is acceptable since the book's primary purpose is to bring together a syntheses of the latest findings on this subject. I suspect that the other books in this series follow this mold as well. Rather than a bibliography, we instead get a "Bibliographical Essay" of several pages. While I typically favor a standard bibliography, the focus and goals of this series make this essay perfectly acceptable under the circumstances. The index is rather bare bones as well, but serves its purpose.

Struggle for the Heartland is a well written summary of the campaigns from Fort Henry to Corinth, giving readers used to a military-only approach to the Civil War a look into the political and social aspects of of the war tie into and guide military thinking. Engle's book is a fine example of "New Military History", and one which should serve to enlighten quite a few students of the war used to standard military history approach to a campaign. I do not want to imply that this book supplants those focusing on specific battles, such Benjamin Franklin Cooling's work on Forts Henry and Donelson or Larry Daniel's and Wiley Sword's studies of Shiloh. Instead, Struggle for the Heartland supplements traditional campaign studies and ties together strategic, political, and social concerns across a large area and span of time. I would recommend this one to those readers less interested in the military tactics of the battles themselves who are instead looking to study other aspects of the war. The book also serves as a fine primer for those students of military history looking to decipher how political and social aspects of the conflict moved and shaped military campaigns.

Struggle For The Heartland: The Campaigns From Fort Henry To Corinth by Stephen D. Engle (Professor of History, Florida Atlantic University) relates the Civil War campaign that began in early 1862 with Union penetration under General Ulysses S. Grant into the Confederate held west that culminated with the Northern capture of the Southern defended town of Corinth, Mississippi. Historian Stephen Engle also examines how prewar economic relations formed in this region, how relationships between locality and loyalty were developed and expressed, the commanders on both sides of the conflict, as well as other civil and military authorities. Engle also describes the campaigns' significance within the larger theater of war and the post-war era of Reconstruction. The Struggle For The Heartland is an informed and informative contribution to Civil War Studies and an enthusiastically recommended contribution to academic reference collections, as well as Civil War buff reading lists.

Struggle For The Heartland: The Campaigns From Fort Henry To Corinth by Stephen Engle (professor of history, Florida Atlantic University) is the exhaustively researched, in-depth story about the military campaign that was the first significant Northern advance into the Confederate west. This campaign crushed all hopes the South had for avoiding a protracted battle, and set the stage for a grim and bloody war of attrition. Highly recommended for Civil War studies reading lists and reference collections, Struggle For The Heartland is an alternately fascinating and disturbing portrayal of a pivotal aspect of American military history.

As with all things associated with Wendell, this book of gatherings is well worth a reader's time -- peaceable rantings is a pretty good description. The most interesting article in the book is, ironically, Eric Freyvogel's, which more or less eviscerates the rugged individualist stance that does occasionally creep into Berry's world -- in spite of the ever-present language of community.

For those who have the privilege of knowing him as a friend, this book
provides additional personal glimpses into the life of the man and his
passionate friendships, as well as revealing the nature of his work as
understood by his colleagues and associates in the fields of agriculture,
poetry, and the art of the essay. For those who have never met him, nor
perhaps ever heard of him, this gem of a book will give them some of
the essence of what he and his work stand for, and will make them want to
seek out the primary texts for themselves. An entertaining and well-
meant tribute to a man who has not only contributed greatly to American
letters, but has turned the ordinary toward the holy (as it was meant
to be) once again.

I most treasured the personal essays in this book and frankly skimmed or skipped over the more scholarly pieces. What becomes clear in this book is how many people's lives and careers have been influenced by Wendell Berry, the professor, the farmer, the poet, the philosopher, the writer, and the friend. I thank Jason Peters for this book and particularly the essays by Wes Jackson, Barbara Kingsolver, Hayden Carruth, and Gene Logsdon and for the wonderful pictures.

Her is a delightful quote from the essay by Donald Hall, a fellow poet, farmer and teacher.
"Another thing we had in common was good, solid, loving, and companionate marriages. On one of our car trips, I complained over the useless, trivial hyperactivity of my eyes gazing at women, At any conference, or in an airport on the way, I find myself continually checking out the beauty of young women, dwelling on figures and faces. It disturbed me that I wasted time and energy evaluating quarries I would never mine. Wendell agreed explosively, as if he had been waiting for someone to bring up the subject. He suffered from this idle habit himself, and found himself in lecture halls doing inventories of the female audience. One day, he told me, he saw one face that was absolutely perfect and irresistible to him. It was a few seconds before he realized that his eyes had lighted on his wife, Tanya."

Being born and raised in Eastern Kentucky, I took for granted the culture that I was surrounded with. When I was in college at Prestonsburg Community College, this book was required reading and then was more of a chore rather than an eye opening experience. After moving from Kentucky to Michigan, I yearned for home. I ordered this book from Amazon.com hoping that it would take me back to the home I longed for. And that it did. I cried when reading the book. Not because it had sad or heart breaking but because it took me back to the home I love so much. I have since sent the book to my dad and he agrees that this book is a must read. It should be required reading in all schools in Eastern Kentucky. Thank you Verna Mae for taking me back home.

Appalachia has gotten a bad rap...hillbillies, poor, ignorant, etc. Those who have lived there, or know people who have, know this is false. After all, Appalachians formed the bedrock of the union movement in this country (think United Mine Workers), fought much of the Civil War, and ran our steel miils.

Ms. Slone does a powerful job of exposing the powerful inner strength developed by residents of these mountains over the generations. She makes you believe that "hillbilly" is not an epithet, but--as she says--an adaptation of the Shakesperean Wiiliam ("Billy") to the mountains--hence, hill billy's.

A great book for anyone who wants to understand (or who already admires) this very important region in our country.

Simple and truthful. If you love the Appalachian South, you'll enjoy this one.

This guidebook to wild flowers in North Carolina has about 500 species illustrated, each with a description and a small photograph of the flower and plant. The guide deserves high marks for the number of species included and the scholarship which went into describing each by location, blooming date, and other information. Brief tidbits concerning medicinal uses, edibiity, and folklore of the plant are included in many descriptions. Indexed are both scientific and common names of each plant.

However, the guide is nearly worthless for the field identification of flowers. There needs to be some sort of key or pattern to help with identification. There seems no rhyme nor reason I can discern with the order in which the flowers are described. It would be a lot better if the flowers were grouped by blooming date and color, e.g. yellow flowers that appear in May should be together as should purple flowers blooming in September.

So, if you want to go into your backyard and identify what is blooming there you will need a field guide, not this book.

Smallchief

Excellent reference book for use in describing flowers growing in North Carolina at certain times of year.

This is a good book to bring along on day hikes. Clear photos and identifying information. It is not about gardening wildflowers.

Finally a history book that is more than a never ending sequence of historical facts. I was pleasantly surprised by the way DeRosier was able to weave together historical facts into a delightful novel about a facinating, historically important figure. I felt history come alive as I read Dunbar. Thank you.

William Dunbar was a talented man whose accomplishments have long been in need of professional assessment. Arthur DeRosier has responded to this need in the first full-scale investigation of available sources, beginning in Scotland, where Dunbar was born. The author's effort has cleared up numerous misunderstandings--such as whether William Dunbar inherited his father's title--and has detailed some of William Dunbar's accomplishments in the New World, the best known of which was his 1804-05 expedition with George Hunter to explore the land drained by the Red and Ouachita Rivers as far as the Hot Springs in what became central Arkansas. This exploration was followed by another Red River expedition in 1806, which Dunbar ably coordinated. Eclipsed in public interest by the 1804-06 Lewis and Clark expedition whose route lay to the north, Dunbar's first attempt to ascertain what the nation had gained by the Louisiana Purchase has now been given the attention it deserves.

Among other national contributions was Dunbar's collaboration with the astronomer Andrew Ellicott to survey the boundary between Spanish West Florida and the United States. Through Ellicott he became known to prominent members of the American Philosophical Society, who welcomed for publication his astronomical and meteorological observations. These in turn had been made possible by the scientific instruments he was able to import as a result of his financial success in growing indigo and cotton. He contributed to the rise of cotton culture in the South by experimenting with improved seeds and by improvements on the cotton gin and on methods of baling cotton for shipment.

Despite the book's subtitle it scants Dunbar's scientific work, however, and has little to say about such pioneering investigations as his study of Indian sign language, his attempt to solve the problem of finding longitude by astronomical methods, his contributions to meteorological record-keeping at a time when the nation lacked a weather bureau, his use of chemical analysis in geology, his good fortune in being the southernmost observer to study the 1806 solar eclipse, etc. These shortcomings may result from the author's heavy reliance on the printed Dunbar letters and papers edited by Eron Rowland and published in 1930--a book notorious for the editor's misreading of the manuscripts and an editor having little understanding of things scientific.

DeRosier says that he hopes his book will "challenge" other scholars to take up aspects of Dunbar's career "that deserve further study and reflection." Perhaps it will.

Without DeRosier's work Dunbar would have been lost. This is a most engaging and remarkable book about a fascinating figure in American history. Highly recommend this text!

History is written by the "winners," the people possessing the money, the power, the control, and the victory over the subservient, weaker, poorer, "losing" groups. These "histories" tell the story of what it was like for the powerful "winners", often failing to describe the experience of the poor. History, however, has been re-written with the arrival of Pem Buck's Worked to the Bone: Race, Class, Power, & Privilege in Kentucky. Worked to the Bone tells the history of America, specifically Kentucky, from a distinctively different point of view in which members of the white, affluent, founding elite are not the heros. Rather, they are the white privileged class that manipulated constructions of race, gender, and other social structures so as to enhance and maintain their ideas of white/social privilege.
Pem Buck vocalizes her beliefs in the work's opening chapter that "the future is shaped by our view of the past" and "history is a story constructed to explain the present." Her aim is to present the history of the people that have been, in her words, "worked to the bone." The elite has worked the "bony-fingered people" since their arrival hundreds of years ago. Her view depicts the "view from under the sink," the view held by the people at the bottom of the social, racial, and economic ladders. Buck's work is successful in that it traces the evolution of societal constructions in Kentucky. However, Worked to the Bone is lacking in its ethnographic edge, failing to involve sufficient personal accounts, as well as its validity.
Ethnographic research, such as that presented in Buck's work, has its difficulties. With ethnographic research and writing one needs to respect the privacy of those with whom they work. Anonymity is a big issue, and if individuals request to remain anonymous, the researcher must comply. Such requests are those with which Buck must deal. This has an impact on her work that is impossible to ignore: places, names, and dates are changed so as to maintain anonymity. Buck's first endnote addresses this issue: "...most requested anonymity; thus all names of local people are pseudonyms...I have given pseudonyms to counties and towns and correspondingly changed names of newspapers and of local histories when they reveal county or town identity..." She also notes that certain locations have been "misplaced" and that census numbers have been altered so as to maintain confidentiality.
Although Buck claims that these alterations in no way alter her argument, the reader cannot help but find him/herself wondering about how much is "true" or not. Is it even possible to use this book as a valid source for one's own academic writing? This is a question that both the reader and writer must address, especially when it comes to citing Buck's research, research that may not be completely true due to respect of privacy issues.
Such are the troubles of ethnography, and the reader may also encounter what s/he may find disappointing: a lack of personal story. While Buck claims that her story is about the people "worked to the bone," the reader finds very few, if any, actual stories about the people of the "North" and "South" counties. Instead the reader finds stories (histories) about people of the area in general: histories free of significant detail, free of sufficient information. Her writing teases the reader: hinting at what went on in Kentucky to certain people without ever going any further.
Despite a deficit in these categories, Buck's writing is rich in historical details and flavor. The history of Kentucky is traced from the early days of European settlement well into the modern day issues and struggles regarding race, gender and religion. Worked to the Bone examines the power structures put into play throughout history and examines the way racial, gender, and social categories were assigned and upheld by the people possessing all the power. Buck makes a point out of the psychological wage of whiteness and the way in which this "wage" is modified to fit into the area's current frame of mind.
The psychological wage of whiteness is one of the much-appreciated consistencies of Buck's work. There are a few metaphors to which Buck repeatedly returns to further her point. Among the most prevalent, in addition to that of the psychological wage, are the "drainage system" and the "bony-fingered" metaphors. Both of the aforementioned relate to the position of the working class people. The "bony-fingered" people are, as mentioned earlier, those of the working, blue-collar class, who are found at the bottom of the "drainage system." This system, an extension of Buck's "view from under the sink" perspective, illustrated in her introduction, is used to show the way in which everything trickles down so as to only benefit the elite, leaving those at the bottom with little more than their bony fingers. These metaphors are referred to regularly throughout the work, a consistency that is helpful for the reader, as the reader is drawn back to Buck's central point repeatedly. This functions to further emphasize and strengthen her Marxist point of view regarding the elitist and working classes.
Just as it is difficult to ignore the persistent Marxist theory in her words, it is also short of impossible to ignore the constant presence of Buck's voice. This may be either helpful or harmful depending on the reader. In a sense, this personal tone adds to the anthropological nature of ethnographic research as the reader senses Buck's passion about a subject to which much time has been dedicated. At the same time, however, one could easily be distracted by this "personal touch," feeling either pulled along from one section to the next or thrown off by the frequently simplistic vocabulary and punchy sentence structure.
What Buck has accomplished is a historically anthropological examination of social structures and structures of production created by and for the elitist class against the poor, lower classes of Kentucky throughout history. She discusses, at length, the ways in which the white male elite strove to maintain the upper hand in terms of race, gender, class, and overall social power. While successfully doing all of this, the weaker aspects of her work tend to carry more weight, distract the reader, and therefore take away from the overall message of her text. Had this work directly discussed the people, had the lower class been given a face, perhaps the reader could have gotten a vivid and long lasting impression of what it was like to truly be worked to the bone.

History is written by the "winners," the people possessing the money, the power, the control, and the victory over the subservient, weaker, poorer, "losing" groups. These "histories" tell the story of what it was like for the powerful "winners", often failing to describe the experience of the poor. History, however, has been re-written with the arrival of Pem Buck's Worked to the Bone: Race, Class, Power, & Privilege in Kentucky. Worked to the Bone tells the history of America, specifically Kentucky, from a distinctively different point of view in which members of the white, affluent, founding elite are not the heros. Rather, they are the white privileged class that manipulated constructions of race, gender, and other social structures so as to enhance and maintain their ideas of white/social privilege.
Pem Buck vocalizes her beliefs in the work's opening chapter that "the future is shaped by our view of the past" and "history is a story constructed to explain the present." Her aim is to present the history of the people that have been, in her words, "worked to the bone." The elite has worked the "bony-fingered people" since their arrival hundreds of years ago. Her view depicts the "view from under the sink," the view held by the people at the bottom of the social, racial, and economic ladders. Buck's work is successful in that it traces the evolution of societal constructions in Kentucky. However, Worked to the Bone is lacking in its ethnographic edge, failing to involve sufficient personal accounts, as well as its validity.
Ethnographic research, such as that presented in Buck's work, has its difficulties. With ethnographic research and writing one needs to respect the privacy of those with whom they work. Anonymity is a big issue, and if individuals request to remain anonymous, the researcher must comply. Such requests are those with which Buck must deal. This has an impact on her work that is impossible to ignore: places, names, and dates are changed so as to maintain anonymity. Buck's first endnote addresses this issue: "...most requested anonymity; thus all names of local people are pseudonyms...I have given pseudonyms to counties and towns and correspondingly changed names of newspapers and of local histories when they reveal county or town identity..." She also notes that certain locations have been "misplaced" and that census numbers have been altered so as to maintain confidentiality.
Although Buck claims that these alterations in no way alter her argument, the reader cannot help but find him/herself wondering about how much is "true" or not. Is it even possible to use this book as a valid source for one's own academic writing? This is a question that both the reader and writer must address, especially when it comes to citing Buck's research, research that may not be completely true due to respect of privacy issues.
Such are the troubles of ethnography, and the reader may also encounter what s/he may find disappointing: a lack of personal story. While Buck claims that her story is about the people "worked to the bone," the reader finds very few, if any, actual stories about the people of the "North" and "South" counties. Instead the reader finds stories (histories) about people of the area in general: histories free of significant detail, free of sufficient information. Her writing teases the reader: hinting at what went on in Kentucky to certain people without ever going any further.
Despite a deficit in these categories, Buck's writing is rich in historical details and flavor. The history of Kentucky is traced from the early days of European settlement well into the modern day issues and struggles regarding race, gender and religion. Worked to the Bone examines the power structures put into play throughout history and examines the way racial, gender, and social categories were assigned and upheld by the people possessing all the power. Buck makes a point out of the psychological wage of whiteness and the way in which this "wage" is modified to fit into the area's current frame of mind.
The psychological wage of whiteness is one of the much-appreciated consistencies of Buck's work. There are a few metaphors to which Buck repeatedly returns to further her point. Among the most prevalent, in addition to that of the psychological wage, are the "drainage system" and the "bony-fingered" metaphors. Both of the aforementioned relate to the position of the working class people. The "bony-fingered" people are, as mentioned earlier, those of the working, blue-collar class, who are found at the bottom of the "drainage system." This system, an extension of Buck's "view from under the sink" perspective, illustrated in her introduction, is used to show the way in which everything trickles down so as to only benefit the elite, leaving those at the bottom with little more than their bony fingers. These metaphors are referred to regularly throughout the work, a consistency that is helpful for the reader, as the reader is drawn back to Buck's central point repeatedly. This functions to further emphasize and strengthen her Marxist point of view regarding the elitist and working classes.
Just as it is difficult to ignore the persistent Marxist theory in her words, it is also short of impossible to ignore the constant presence of Buck's voice. This may be either helpful or harmful depending on the reader. In a sense, this personal tone adds to the anthropological nature of ethnographic research as the reader senses Buck's passion about a subject to which much time has been dedicated. At the same time, however, one could easily be distracted by this "personal touch," feeling either pulled along from one section to the next or thrown off by the frequently simplistic vocabulary and punchy sentence structure.
What Buck has accomplished is a historically anthropological examination of social structures and structures of production created by and for the elitist class against the poor, lower classes of Kentucky throughout history. She discusses, at length, the ways in which the white male elite strove to maintain the upper hand in terms of race, gender, class, and overall social power. While successfully doing all of this, the weaker aspects of her work tend to carry more weight, distract the reader, and therefore take away from the overall message of her text. Had this work directly discussed the people, had the lower class been given a face, perhaps the reader could have gotten a vivid and long lasting impression of what it was like to truly be worked to the bone.

In Worked to the Bone: Race, Class, Power, & Privilege in Kentucky, Pem Davidson Buck offers an intimate view of social history "from under the sink," as she puts it. Her concern is with the lives of men and women whose labors typically go unnoticed and uncelebrated in popular history. Indeed, insofar as popular history books and history textbooks tend to assume the naturalness of elite privilege (such is the essence of the "great man" theory of history), Buck's study is very pointedly offered as an antidote to the orthodoxy. Her focus is on the power struggles between the wealthy and the exploited in Kentucky, and on how modern racial and class identities have been forged in the fire of that struggle. By extension, her work offers a keen analysis of the cultural formations that shape the identities of all Americans.

Elites weren't born to rule, and there certainly isn't any divine ordinance guaranteeing their continued dominance. Thus, as Buck's account of Kentucky history reveals, they could never afford to take their power for granted. Their strategy historically has been to divide and conquer. From the colonial period to the post-cold war period elites have pitted non-elites against each other--men against women, Europeans against Africans, northern Europeans against southern Europeans, the Irish against the English, "real Americans" against naturalized immigrants, middle class against lower class--in order to maintain their iron grip on power. They also have had to police the arbitrary borders of human identity that they helped to create. Buck's study especially excels at showing how the ideological construction of the "white race" has helped to promote elite privilege over the last three centuries.

Worked to the Bone is a fine book that seeks not only to instruct, but also to affect a real change in attitudes about class politics in the United States. Buck is clearly on a mission here, and her readily accessible prose style means that people both in and out of the academy will be able to read her, and clearly understand her message. She compels us to examine what the lives of typical working class people in Kentucky and elsewhere might be like if the elites were dethroned, and if our country's resources were distributed in a more humane and truly democratic fashion.

This novel is one of the big sleepers in 20th century American fiction, and adds a twin peak to Penn Warren's other novelistic masterpiece, All the King's Men.

On the surface, the story traces the rise, career, love, and misadventures of Jeremiah Beaumont in the early days of Kentucky and of this republic. Simultaneously it is a meditation on the process of history, and its strangeness to the eyes and ears of later generations. Unlike All the King's Men, wherein there is 1st person narrative by a main character, Jack Burden, who fairly almost drowns in history, here the narrative is 3rd person and objective. We are immediately distanced by the narrator/historian, who holds in his hands the letters and court documents relating to Jeremiah, in the 1st sentence: "I can show you what is left." Indeed, the story is largely based on actual material discovered by Katherine Ann Porter and given to Warren.

From here a fascinating narrative opens as we are immediately dropped into frontier Kentucky with the young lawyer's assistant Jeramiah. The passion and violence of the setting is made palpable, along with Jeremiah's youthful lust and apparent idealism, and the manner in which they affect his relationship with his employer -- but to go into details would spoil this engrossing and fascinating story. The merit is the confidence with which Penn Warren engages the strangeness of this world, without the usual method in "historical fiction" of merely dressing up contemporary figures in old costume. These people are puzzles, and the burden of the text is to unwind them. Yet they are so alive on the page, so true, that we are able to follow deeply into their bizarre depths and the alien wonder of early America.

In the end, the reader will have lived in early western Kentucky and emerged back in the contemporary world stunned. Penn Warren's passionate engagement with the American psyche carries one through the several hundred pages effortlessly. The book is many things -- straight realism, philosophical speculation, moral tale, melodrama, psychological portrait. Finally, it is simply one of the few 20th century novels to take up the multi-faceted challenge of Herman Melville to plunge into the national heart, with no pre-established goal except to come back home with as much truth as two arms can carry.

This novel, one of Warren's best, is set in Kentucky in 1825, and is concerned with power and redemption - and also what may or may not be the truth. Jeremiah Beaumont, an idealistic lawyer and promising politician, becomes disillusioned with his benefactor (Cassius Fort) when he learns that Fort has seduced a young girl (Rachel Jordan). Beaumont "rescues" Rachel and proposes marriage to her; she accepts only if he promises to kill Fort. But Fort refuses to fight Beaumont, and in an excellent piece of character development, Warren shows the betrayal and weakness this refusal instills in Beaumont. He and Rachel marry anyway, but when Beaumont reads a political handbill revealing the affair between Rachel and Fort, he thinks Fort wrote it to end his political ambitions. Now he kills Fort and is arrested. He escapes from jail and learns that another character, Wilkie Barron, had written the handbill, not Fort. Rachel commits suicide and Beaumont is murdered while trying to get the truth told.

Warren, as part of his narrative method, uses a number of letters and diaries and a manuscript written by Beaumont found amongst his papers as a means of conveying the story. But, of course, these represent only Beaumont's side of the story and may not be "the truth" at all. Warren's characters are strongly drawn; the ambitious and evil manipulator, Wilkie Barron, is particularly good. The suicide of Rachel is a bit melodramatic, though it's tempered somewhat by the unhappiness and trials she faces living with Beaumont. Warren based the novel on a true story. A highly regarded work, it's among the best of his novels.

This book was in my library for a number of years and I had not read it. Most of my reading time was taken with non-fiction. Finally, I decided that any book by an American author that had received three Pulitzer prizes including prose and poetry, must be worth reading.

If fact, this book is very well written. The character development is excellent, dialog is as I remember it when working in the rural areas of Kentucky during summer vacations from college in the 50's. The plot is well developed and the story is interesting and thought provoking.

On the surface, this is the story of Jeremiah Beaumont and his larger-than-life difficulties. Beneath the surface, this is a story of integrity, morals, truth and justice. It is not a story of "hope". The final sentence pretty well sums it up: "Was all for naught?