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along huge boulders. Where the road topped a ridge I could see down a long valley that looked like it had been bombed. When we descended and drove along close by the creek, I could see the water was black with acid runoff. Ultimately, it is Miller's poetic power that makes this book so endearing , for the novel isn't stuffed with intricacies of plot. The events of the novel, quite frankly, are shared by many youths in all parts of the world. Yet what keeps readers reading and what satisfies them in the end is the poet's facility with language to create a kind of communion by bringing together people and places worthy of a tale. We are going to hear more about Newfound. Young and old alike, for many years to come, will revel in its splendor. -Marshall Myers Miller, Danny L. Wingless Flights: Appalachian Women in Fiction. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1996. 187 pages. Paperback. $21.95. As the title suggests, Wingless Flights is a book about incongruities. More specifically, it is an intriguing analysis of America's paradoxical views concerning Southern Appalachia, and the concomitant stereotypes which emerged in the post-Civil War period. Prior to the Civil War, mountain people had been viewed as simply a pioneer stock living in the remote and isolated hollows of the Appalachian mountains. After the war, however—a war in which many Southern mountaineers surprised everyone by siding with the Union—Appalachian hill folk became a peculiar people, admired by some and disdained by others. Focusing on various depictions of southern mountain women from the 1880s to the 1950s, Appalachian scholar Danny Miller explores the literary works of seven authors: Mary Noailles Murfree, Edith Summers Kelley, Anne W. Armstrong, Emma Bell Miles, Jesse Stuart, James Still, and Harriette Arnow. While some of these writers are outsiders and others are native to the region, Miller does not dwell on polarities. Conversely, he finds paradoxes in all the fiction he surveys; thus Wingless Flights seeks both to trace changes in literary descriptions of mountain women and to identify consistencies in characterizing their qualities. Though local colorist Mary Noailles Murfree, for example, has been justly criticized for her romantic idealizations of Appalachian women in 67 works such as The Prophet ofthe Great Smoky Mountains, Miller believes that she was genuinely sympathetic toward mountain people, and that, like her literary counterparts, Murfree emphasized a primary characteristic of mountain women: the almost mythic connection between woman and nature. Closely tied to the different ways in which men and women respond to nature/the land is another recurring aspect of women's lives in Appalachian literature of the early twentieth century: the emotional and spiritual distance which exists between women and their husbands. Miller's analysis of the relationships between fictional couples—Jerry and Judith Blackford in Edith Summer Kelley's Weeds, Brack and Alpha Baldridge in James Still's River of Earth, Clovis and Gertie Nevéis in Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker—is superb, and will prove a valuable resource for gender studies, as well as in Appalachian literature classes. In 1905, Emma Bell Miles referred to women as the silent, wingless mates of their husbands ( The Spirit ofthe Mountains). As revealed in the literature of both natives and non-natives of the region, however, wingless mountain women often fly to heights of courage, endurance, and heroism. Miller's insight into this paradox informs his analysis of the emerging depictions ofAppalachian women in the literature of the early 1900s, and his ability to extract and compress such a wealth of material from a very diverse cast of authors promises to make Wingless Flights a major contribution to cultural studies throughout America. —Ginny Carney Sohn, Mark F. Mountain Country Cooking. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996. 400 pages. Hardcover, $26.95. Mountain Country Cooking is a gathering of over three hundred recipes from the Smoky Mountains to the Blue Ridge. Sohn gives a mini-history lesson as he ties each recipe to both the past and the present culinary heritage of the Appalachian area. Each recipe is accompanied by a degree-of-difficulty rating, which will...
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