Ohio Valley Books

While looking to see if one of my favorite historical authors (James Alexander Thom) had a new novel out, I came across the books of Allan W. Eckert on of those "If You Like This Book, You'll Like This Too" lists. I had never heard of Eckert before, but based upon the GREAT reviews of this book I decided to give it a try. What a suprise! All of the positive reviews aren't lying. I can't put the book down! It just pulls you in until you feel like you're roaming the Ohio Valley with Kenton and all the other brave folks (White and Indian). The 588 LARGE pages make it extra special for folks like myself who fly through books quickly. I would highly recommend the book and can't wait to start another one by him.

P.S. The books by James Alexander Thom are equally well written for those who are looking for a simular type author.

Wow, what an interesting, exciting, factual book! Just as engaging and excitingly written as any Louis Lamour or Zane Grey novel, except very factual. Based on tens of thousands of pages of interview notes taken from those who lived during this period of history. You will learn a lot of American history and enjoy it, to boot, if you read this book! Don't miss this one!

Eckert has written a truly engrossing book on an amazing figure in American history. Simon Kenton, like Daniel Boone had the lust to wonder the woods for days and both had a immense memory for the scope of the land he wondered. The narrative writing is excellent. It puts you back in the 18th century when America was truly wild. It was a harsh land when one false step led to an early death, often times gruesome. The Shawnees were none to compliant to give up their lands and sold it at a high cost of human life. Tecumseh also emerges here, also one of the greatest figures in history. A Sorrow in Our Heart, which is about Tecumseh is also a must read. In the Frontiersman, the Ohio River flowed blood red with hatred for intruders. There are captivating stories here of the many clashes that took place between whites and indians. It was a time period of two cultures clashing, one wanting to hold on to a way of life etched into the land through balance and harmony, aganst a culture that produced men who were determined to see new vistas and experience the thrill of blazing a trail that many would soon follow. But it was this migration which ruined the very thing they loved most, the feeling of true wilderness. This book captures it all. A must read for those who find history a fascinating subject.

I first became acquainted with Mr. Eckert's books a few years ago while shopping for a gift for my son-in-law who loves local history and someone recommended one of his books. I took it home and while wrapping it, read a page. I was hooked, I went out and bought one for myself. We live in an area rich in history and his books cover our area extensively. I only wish all the history classes I took in high school and college had been this interesting. Our whole family now enjoys Mr. Eckert's books.

I was assigned to read this book for my 10th grade American History summer reading. I loved to read as a teen. I loved history -- I went on to get my degree in it. This book threatened to change all of that.
A ponderous piece of agonizing minutiae, this book brought me to the breaking point. I read it -- the whole thing. As a fifteen year old. I think it actually made me cry, I hated it so much. It's well researched, but seemed almost masturbatory in its envisioning of the motivations of frontiersmen. And excruciatingly long. Some people obviously enjoy this book. To each their own. But for the rest of you, it is okay to hate it. Really. You know you want to.

A wholesome, interesting story. I think it could have used a lot of pruning and it definitely needed a proofreader, with all the errors in punctuation and grammar.

What a wonderful book this is. Mrs. Ellinger has created characters that immediately seem like old friends, and your heart is quickly drawn into the ebb and flow of their lives. The story is positive and uplifting, and leaves you wanting more (thankfully, there is a sequel in "The Wild Rose of Promise"). I couldn't put the book down.

I loved this book! When you are reading it, you feel as though you are really there. One can empathize with Elizabeth's trials and rejoice with her in her victories!! I am definitely looking forward to the sequel!

As a Lancaster native who now lives in KY, I thoroughly enjoyed this period piece written about life in Lancaster 150 years ago. The characters were so believable and the setting was described so clearly that I was able to visualize the entire story as it took place in what is now the historic district of Lancaster. I am anxiously awaiting the sequel!!!

For anyone of any faith, this is a must read. It is a wonderfully, riveting book that can't be put down once it is started. I can hardly wait for the sequel!

Thank you, Ruth, for sharing your faith and ancestry with all of us!

This book is THE BEST!! My absolute favorite wildflower book for the North Georgia Mountains... and I have tried MANY. I am a professional naturalist and lead wildflower hikes all spring. This book is my bible! I carry it everywhere I go. Easy to use, lots of species covered, wonderful ethnobotany information (great "stories" to use while leading hikes). Detailed enough to get the ID right, general enough for anyone to use. Wonderful wonderful wonderful wonderful book... (as are Lone Pine's other plant books covering other regions.) HIGHLY RECCOMMENDED!!

I've been cataloging thousands of wildflower photos over the past six years and probably own or have "borrowed" most wildflower field ID guides that are out there. This book is easily my favorite. Why?

Easy to use: A color key w/thumbnail images for more than half of the flowers in the book makes finding the right flower much easier if you do not know which family of flowers to search in. If you do have to browse all the pages then the placement of flower photos along the outside edges of the pages makes thumbing thru the book easier than most. The pages are substantial enough to make for easy browsing too.

Ethnobotanical info: Most flowers have a special paragraph about the historical and current usages of the flowering plants for purposes other than visual pleasure, i.e. medicinal, food, ceremonial, dyes, etc.

I'd been using Jack Carman's book "Wildflowers of Tennessee" as my "bible" for TN wildflowers but now this book with a similar name is my favorite. I still use the Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Wildflowers as a "family locator" because of its easy-to-use key (flower color plus bloom type) when searching for that unknown flower. One big aggravation with the Audubon book is that the details are in the "white pages" somewhere in the back of the book. The Wildflowers of Tennessee book has all of the info right there on the same page as the photo.

For newbies the color key makes this book user friendly--even though the flowers are grouped by family, genus then species (as are most wildflower field guides).

Downside? There are still many, many species flower flowers that have only a description rather than an actual photograph. However, this book is small enough to be practical in the field.

The price is great! I paid almost thirty dollars for the Carman book and it was worth every penny. I don't know how they can sell this fabulous book for such a low price.

Highly recommended. If you want to buy only one wildflower ID book for the Smokies then this is it.

I love this book. Great photo's. Easy to use. Small enough to take along. Interesting plant lore on every page.

I purchased this book for a friend's birthday and after looking through it, nearly kept it.

This is the absolute book for wildflowers. Pictures are clear and precise, the information is a bonus. What a book!

I just finished reading this to my three children (2nd grade twins and 4th grader). We loved the book! Each chapter left the kids begging me to read longer. It is full of suspense and adventure. The historical references are true to the times and give the reader a sense of what life was like in the late 1700's. My 4th grader is studying Ohio history. This was a wonderful novel to add to her studies. Reading level is closer to 5th grade. When we were finished, the kids each wrote an additional "chapter" of their own that answered questions they were left with or additional things that they "saw" in the story. Great fun!

Danger Along The Ohio by Patricia Wills'. This book takes place on the Ohio River in 1793. The main characters are Amos Clara and Jonathan. Their mother died after giving birth to Jonathan. Now all they have is a father. Amos, Clara, and Jonathan have a very playful pet cow.

In Danger Along The Ohio Amos Clara and Jonathan get separated from their dad during a heart stopping Indian attack! The problem is they can't find him. My favorite part is when they escape the Indian attack.

I recommend this book to a friend because it is packed with excitement and interest. I give it 5 stars because it is really exciting but it is a little slow at the beginning of the book. Patricia Wills' books are very interesting.

My book was about three kids, Clara, Jonathan, and Amos trying to survive in the wilderness. They have been separated from their father and their home. The Indians set fire to their flatboat on the Ohio River. All three kids run for their lives while their father is fighting. The only food they have is nuts, and milk from their cow. After a week of walking they are captured by Indians. The Indians didn't kill them because Amos saved an Indian that was drowning in the Ohio River because he was shot and he was too weak to save himself. They named him Red Moccasin because when they found him he was wearing a Red Moccasin on his head.
The Shawnee Indians wanted Clara, Jonathan, and Amos to part of their tribe. So they stayed with the Indians for two days. They thought they were doomed, they thought their lives were over! Then that night white men attacked the campus. While the war was in session the three of them escaped very quietly, then about a mile away a white man found them. The next thing you know Red Moccasin has a gun at Amos's forehead. Then he remembered how Amos saved his his life, he changed his mind. They asked the white man if he knew their father, he said their father was still living. i think this book is a fifth grade book. This book was very fun to read! It was a great adventure!

This book contains a great mix of charaters and plots. Even though they could of jazzed it up a little it was stil a ture and great story for education, intrest, and fun. The book was a travel along the ohio most of the time.

Danger Along The Ohio by Patricia Willis is an excellent story about pioneer life in Ohio during the mid to late 1700's. This book is full of adventure that will keep the reader on the edge of their seat! It is a book you will not want to put down once you begin reading it. The language in this book is wonderful. It is full of similes, metaphors, imagery, onomatopoeia, and more. This book also provides the opportunity to discuss how the white pioneers viewed the Native Americans, and vice verse. For anyone who wants to know more about Ohio life during this time, this is a perfect book. Kids love it!

I've just finished COAL MINER'S HOLIDAY after delaying the ending for a few months. I hated to see this excursion end. Kiki DeLancey's style of writing is unique and engaging. She introduces the reader to unknown worlds of labor, strife and the bowels of the earth in one large sweep of pure unadulterated reality. This is a world of coal miners, a world unavailable to the average reader. Their passions and disappointments, their pleasures and personal endeavors are unlike those of the average citizen. I enjoy new experiences, delving into lives that are remote from my journey and learning something new when I read a book and Kiki provides all of these things with vigor and charm. Her stories engage the reader, her characters captivate the reader, and her themes linger long after leaving this particular road. I cannot say that I preferred one short piece over another, or one character more than another, but I can say that I'll be first in line when her next book arrives.

When I began reading the first story in Coal Miner's Holiday, I Loved the Squire, I thought of Hemmingway, mostly because of the stark and sometimes choppy prose. I'm not a huge Hemmingway fan, so I had my reservations, but by the end of the story, I found myself marveling. Delancey is a unique voice, and her stories stick in the mind. As is often the case in good writing, their complexity is belied by the simplicity of their language. It isn't the stuff of MFA programs; it's real, often rough, sometimes down-and-dirty.

These are not all stories about coal miners, although they are set in midwestern coal country. Some, like the trilogy bracketed under the heading "Swingtime" and the marvelous little gem, "Story of the Bread" (My personal favorite; I believe it should be required reading for EVERYONE, period), spring from the author's Greek background. Delancey jumps back and forth in time--"The Seven Pearls," for example, delivers us an oddball prophet in the Hippie age, while Dinger and Blacker is set in and around a speakeasy.

This is great stuff. Buy, enjoy, give it to someone who appreciates fine, quirky writing and very human characters.

Susan O'Neill
Author, Don't Mean Nothing: Short Stories of Viet Nam

Coal Miner's Holiday by Kiki Delancey is a book of short stories that more closely resembles poetry. She writes a variety of different types of stories with the constant being her use of vivid metaphorical descriptions. The first story is told from the perspective of the main character's thought processes. The accuracy with which DeLancey puts the character's thoughts into writing creates an interesting effect since we rarely think with the same focused coherence that we use to tell stories. The result is that we read two stories at once, what is physically happening and what the character thinks is happening.
Most of the stories in Coal Miner's Holiday are not long narratives involving fantastic or complex plots. Rather they could be compared to snap shot portraits of moments that capture an emotion or mood. These stories are of the colorful characters and personality quirks that arise to make life interesting in small towns of working folks where there is nothing better to do. The artistry the author displays in expressing the nuances of these moments has the quality of works you might find in photographs hanging on fancy museum walls.

With vivid characters and some gallows humor, Kiki Delancey's stories -- set mostly in run down and dying coal mining towns -- introduce the reader to familiar and mysterious human longings. In the hilariously punchlined story *What The Hell* a guy and his old high school sweetheart engage in a long running and doomed from the start attempt to consumate what had never been, even though by the time they can actually find the time to "get together" the woman is 6 months pregnant and the baby in the oven is an active little bugger. The last line (I won't ruin it here) made me roar with laughter. I mean, it's irony or whatever it was was just too good, too funny.

A story in the collection that affected me in quite an opposite way was *Washed,* wherein the simple act of a mother washing her little children is tranformed into a deeply symbolic and sacred act of final devotion and letting go. It's like slap-you-in-the- face sobering and austerely beautiful.

There are so many great stories here that it's hard to choose which ones to include here in this 1000 word max review. There's the Mississipi Review Best Story of the Year (2000 I think) prize winner "The Mystery of George Jones" that portrays a strange boy, wise beyond his years, whose hero worship of George Jones goes way beyond the normal fan club dues and autographed photos of the average rabid fan. Anyway. He emulates the country singer to make himself forget the mundane ordinariness of his life, as kind of a poultice from having to face *it.* It's a great story. And then there's the creepy basket case of the collection's first story *I Loved the Squire* who, it is made clear, is not all there. But whose heart-felt appreciation of beauty (even if it is a floating girl he just knifed) makes the reader sympathize with this murderer somehow. He reminded me of the murderous necrophiliac in Cormac McCarthy's *Child of God.* And the story *Two Strippers* is short and sweet and packs a real punch along the same lines as *Mystery of GJ* in that it's pov character is striving to give order and beauty to an austere world that offers no outward signs of either.

And there are loads more I haven't even touched on. The characters shine and the settings are depressing. The fantastic dynamic in most of these stories is the character's often futile but dogged attempts to transcend their circumstances and find some diamonds in the pile of coal that life has dealt them.

I recently read the Great Black Swamp I & II and found both books to be well written with many interesting and often obscure historical accounts. The book is well illustrated with relevant photos. I would recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in early US history, pioneers, Indians, etc.

I just bought these books three days ago and have finished them all. Mollenkopf needs to write more!!! I am from the Black Swamp area of Ohio ~~ and I remember the tales of my childhood when my father told me stories of how big the trees used to be before civilization came along and drained the Black Swamps. However, I have to clarify that I am from the southwestern part of the Black Swamp, which to my disappointment, is not featured very much in his Black Swamp books. Never mind ~~ I live in Defiance now and have traveled back and forth to Toledo ~~ so some of the landmarks he's talking about is in this book and I am familiar with them.

If you are a history buff ~~ this is a great book for you to read about this area of the country. If you like Ohio history or even American history ~~ this book is definitely for you! It starts back in the beginning with Anthony Wayne's fight against the British and the Indians and end with Charles Dicken's visit to Ohio. All these little stories ~~ beautifully written and easy to read ~~ makes you long for more stories. These stories remind me of sitting at my dad's knee and listening to the stories of days yonder. In today's frantic world, it is hard to imagine what the world used to be. This book offers a glimpse of a quieter but harsher life.

I highly recommend this book for any serious reader! It's hard put down!

10-12-05

Being from Northwest Ohio, I liked this book in particular because I could relate to every location Mollenkopf mentioned, although I believe anyone interested in how people lived in early America and dealt with the difficulties of travel will like this book. This book is very well written, not boring like some history books; I couldn't put it down. There are many pictures, old and new, and a tribute to a revolutionary war veteran. I learned many interesting things about the history of the area where I live, many of them just miles from my home. I liked it so much I put three more of Mollenkopf's books on my wish list, I can't wait to read "The Great Black Swamp II".

James Smith's captivity narrative about his capture and life among the Canawaugha Indians is the best I've read among this gendre of literature. Smith presents his captors as human beings making their way in a beautiful, but harsh environment.

His prose is surprisingly clear, lively and straight forward for a mid-eighteenth century writer.

Very authentic insights into native-american life and the life of a captive. Best parts: How James learns native- american knowledge of the forest to save himself when he became lost. (Treetops point south toward the sun, there are more branches on south part of certain trees, etc). He spends a night inside a hollow tree during a fierce blizzard and survives. Unbelievable story! How did these captives ever survive such ordeals? READ THIS BOOK! A good way to gain insight into native-american culture!

This is without a doubt the very best book ever written about Indian captives of the French and Indian Wars or Indian captive narratives in general. It is a first person account - sharing a realism no others can match - written over 200 years ago by James Smith. The vast majority of works on this subject are filled with racial hate, a measure of Early American attitudes towards Native Americans, masking the realities of war, captivities and white- Indian relations. Sadly, this perverse formula of writing tales on the captives of native Americans is still alive and well today as we approach the 21 Century - ignoring the actual histories and huge amounts of primary research material available. This book should be read by every 7th or 8th grader in the US studying American history. American history text books used by middle and high school children should all contain excerpts from this book. Anyone interested in Native American history should read it. And, anyone interested in an easy read, something beautiful and inspirational, should buy this book! Michael C. Cohill

This is a reprint of a book published in the 19th century. A source book for all other books on the Adena and the Hopewell. A Must have.

Ancient Monuments (more familiarly known as "Squire and Davis") is the undisputed primary reference source on Indian mounds in the eastern US till the mid-1800s. While there were a few others (such as Caleb Atwater's book), Squire and Davis offers the grandest illustrations of what remained of the unbelievable civilizations that inhabited this continent. Even as they published in 1848, hundreds of mounds were being plowed into oblivion; so few are still extant that theirs is the only guide to what was lost. The text is enjoyable on many levels, and can be forgiven for any lapses of scientific accuracy. They trekked over Ohio at a time when we weren't even sure who made the mounds, so everything they recorded is gold. The engineering prowess, the sheer magnificence and scale of some of the works, is astounding.

When DeLanna and Andrew finally arrive in the Ohio Firelands, they must face cold and disapproving matrons and the everchallenging environment. Slowly, they find acceptance, friendship and their place in the community. As the story closes we look to the future of their young daughter Mattie, and uncertain changes to the town as the canal opens the land to an uneasy progress. This was a wonderful series of books and I look forward to BOOK FIVE! Does anyone know when that might be?

I loved this book in the Apple Valley series. DeLanna and her husband, Andrew, have finaly arrived in Ohio after a long voyage from Pennsylvania. Together with Andrew, DeLanna fights to build a place called home and to gain acceptance in the community.

Original published in 1856 as the first general reference available on the subject of American riverboats, this superbly reprinted edition from Land Yacht Press of Lloyd's Steamboat Directory And Disasters On The Western Waters features a new introduction by Gregory G. Poole and is a wonderful contribution to the history of American steamboating. Highly recommended, long out of print, Lloyd's Steamboat Directory And Disasters On The Western Waters will prove invaluable to students of steamboating, American river travel, and histories of the American frontier.

The best part of American history, as far as I'm concerned, is the history of paddlewheel steamboats. We knew that many of them sunk, but this book tells you HOW they sunk, and where. If you're a steamboat lover, this book will fill in the gaps for you. It has about 100 illustrations of steamboat disasters and maps, an index of boats, and an informative introduction to the new edition. Highly recommended supplement to the steamboat bible: Fred Way's Packet Directory.