By Various Authors
Here is another West Virginia Book Round-Up featuring books about West Virginia and Appalachia. We look forward to receiving review suggestions throughout the year, and generally publish a “round-up” each winter. If you are interested in reviewing a book or would like to suggest a book for review, please reach out to us. As always, we encourage you to check with your local independent bookstore for these titles! –ed.
Among the Mountains, The Lovetts and Their Hill Top House
By Lynn Pechuekonis
(Harpers Ferry Park Association, 273 pp.)
Meticulously researched and beautifully stitched together, Pechuekonis tells the story of the Lovetts and their Hill Top House. The story of an African American family that, just 25 years after the Civil War, resolutely opened a summer resort hotel in Harper’s Ferry. Despite Jim Crow laws furthering segregation and racism at that time, their resort was incredibly successful. While summer resorts were popular during the Victorian era, The Hill-Top house was special in that it was a Black-owned resort that catered to White middle-class patrons. The Lovetts operated the resort with clever business models and impeccable hospitality. Each chapter is interspersed with news clippings, photos, maps, correspondence, and asides offering more information to relate the story of the Lovett’s to the wider world. With an extensive bibliography and index, this book is absolutely brimming with information on the Lovetts, Harpers Ferry, and the fate of the Hill Top Inn itself, ranging in time from the Victorian era to the present day. The Lovetts ran the resort for close to 40 years. During that time, it was visited by presidents and congressmen, socialites and actors, as well as middle and upper-class tourists from the DC area and beyond. Pechuekonis’s research and subsequent book have provided yet another unique story from the history of Harper’s Ferry.
Kade Holley Forest Ranger, Volume 7 and 8
By Dan Kincaid
(Kade Holley Publishing, 170 pp., 174 pp.)
Dan Kinkaid revisits the Character of Kade Holley in Volumes 7 and 8 of his “Kade Holley Forest Ranger series. Follow Kade Holley across the US, where he works various jobs as a forest ranger, consultant, teacher, and more—from his first assignment in the Monongahela National Forest, onwards to Illinois and Nebraska, and back to Bartow, West Virginia. These books are a fun and informative look at the life of a forest ranger. Copies are available for purchase through booksellers such as Barnes & Noble or Amazon.
Soul Friend and Other Love Notes to the Natural World
by Sheila McEntee
(Blackwater Press, 87 pp.)
McEntee has compiled several short essays spread over 15 sections that reflect on her life and connections to the natural world. Eloquently phrased with lovely watercolor illustrations by artist Sophie Kromholz dispersed throughout, this is a great choice for nature lovers and admirers of the self-reflective writing. McEntee takes the reader through her own memories, from birding to social distancing and the isolation of COVID-19, to cherished pets, divorce, and the loss of her mother. Through it all, nature serves as a backdrop, enhancing each short entry.
The American Log Cabin: Folk Architecture and Lore on the
Old Frontier of West Virginia
By Gerald Milnes
(35th Star Publishing, 263 pp.)
Review by Alan Byer
GGerald “Gerry” Milnes is, arguably, the dean of West Virginia cultural history and anthropology, and a list of his articles, books, recorded music, and videos would fill pages. His latest contribution is a scholarly work, backed by an extensive bibliography, but his obvious enthusiasm for the subject and the breadth of his knowledge make for a good read. Gerry intersperses his descriptions of the evolving construction techniques and styles with quotes from old songs, poems, folk tales, and superstitions, and traces structure types and characteristics back to their countries of origin. Who knew that a common West Virginia log construction detail can be dated back to Swedish immigrants and that German and Swiss pioneers exerted such an important influence on West Virginia mountain folkways? Gerry is a careful researcher and leaves no stone unturned.
The American Log Cabin is divided into 14 chapters, with an introduction and an afterward. The first four chapters are devoted to a roughly chronological discussion of the evolution of the first pioneers’ shelters from deep rock overhangs to forts and simple cabins (early settlers’ cabins), and then to more complex structures (secondary log houses). At this point, in Chapters five and six, Gerry pauses to delve more deeply into the actual construction techniques he mentioned earlier. I have to admit that, at first glance, I wondered about the presentation order of those two chapters, reasoning that they could have been placed at the beginning of the book. However, after reading the existing first four chapters, a more detailed treatment of the actual construction methods at that point made sense to me. The author then devotes the next seven chapters to other types of log buildings and constructions, ending with split-rail and other fences. In “If Buildings Could Talk,” the final chapter, Gerry discusses some of the more unusual and slightly lurid stories related to some of the cabins he studied and photographed; and in “Afterward”, he traces his own personal, 40-year journey to the creation of this fine book.
Those of us who are fascinated by our fair state’s cultural history will consider The American Log Cabin a must-read, just like author Milnes’s other offerings.
Black Coal & Red Bandanas: An Illustrated History of the West Virginia Mine Wars
By Raymond Tyler
(PM Press, 107 pp.)
This graphic novel is an interesting approach to the telling of our State’s labor history. As West Virginia author Denise Giardina stated about the book, “It is past time to use the unique attributes of graphic arts to tell the remarkable story of the West Virginia Mine Wars…” With a narrative put together by Raymond Tyler, and eye catching graphic art by Summer McClinton, this book is a great introduction to the story of the West Virginia Mine Wars. It would make a great addition to any history teacher’s curriculum, in West Virginia and across the US. Broken into four chapters, this book lays out the Mine Wars in four important moments: The beginning of the struggle with the story of Mother Jones and Frank Keeney; The Paint Creek & Cabin Creek Strikes; The Matewan Massacre; and The Battle of Blair Mountain. With a foreword by Gordon Simmons, a retired union organizer and president of the West Virginia Labor History Association, and Shaun Slifer, creative director at the West Virginia Mina Wars Museum, and an afterword by editor Paul Buhle, a retired senior lecturer at Brown University, this short graphic novel packs a whole lot of history into its 107 pages.
Custom Made Woman: A Life in Traditional Music
by Alice Gerrard
(The University of North Carolina Press, 176 pp)
Review by Alan Byer
In this eminently readable book, Alice Gerrard chronicles her 90-year life (to this point) and more than 60-year career as a female singer and musician in the male-dominated world of traditional music. Though she never lived in West Virginia, she collaborated with Mountain State folk-music luminaries including Hazel Dickens, Tracy Schwarz, Ginny Hawker, and Don and Hedy West. Custom Made Woman is lavishly supported by photographs, in the early years by her first husband, Jeremy Foster, who died tragically in a car accident after seven years of marriage and four kids, and later by herself, which she often developed herself in makeshift darkrooms.
Though Alice’s recollections read like a who’s who from the world of traditional music, past and present, the most important parts of this book, at least from this reviewer’s perspective, deal with Hazel Dickens, daughter of Montcalm, West Virginia, and Alice’s one-time musical partner and lifelong friend. Hazel Dickens was an intensely private person, yet Alice managed to forge a deep professional and personal relationship that lasted until Hazel departed this life in 2011.
Alice continues to perform and record, and we’re fortunate that she took the time to create Custom Made Woman. Rolling Stone Magazine named the book one of 2025’s 15 most important releases dealing with the music industry, and their reviewer included this quote from Alice herself: “Instead of heading down paths of more popular folk music…I took the road less traveled,” Gerrard writes. “I had a need to understand not only the music but its context, the everyday of it, the politics of it; to understand cultures different from my own.”
Through Custom Made Woman, Alice Gerrard reflects an abiding understanding, gained from exposure to the music and life experiences of Hazel Dickens and others, of the forces that created our traditional music in the first place. Though she didn’t grow up in Appalachia and came to old-time mountain music as an adult, Alice really gets it on a level few of us can hope to attain.
Laiken Blankenship
Alan Byer
Authors, Various. "West Virginia Books Available." Goldenseal West Virginia Traditional Life, Winter 2025. https://goldenseal.wvculture.org/west-virginia-books-available/