Curious about Appalachia: A Booklist
By Audrey Swartz, Adult Services and Readers’ Advisory Librarian
What happens when a Vice-Presidential candidate also happens to have written a book? Super long hold lists, long patron wait times, and struggling with the ability to order more (because everyone wants more) is the lesson being felt by almost every library in the country. If you happen to be on one of those lists, here are several alternatives you can read that will also provide a unique look into Appalachia.
All information for these titles has been taken from our catalog, which can be accessed at Manhattan Public Library Catalog.
“The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia” by Emma Copley Eisenberg.
In the early evening of June 25, 1980, in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, two middle-class outsiders named Vicki Durian, 26, and Nancy Santomero, 19, were murdered in an isolated clearing. Emma Copley Eisenberg spent years living in Pocahontas and re-investigating these brutal acts. Using the past and the present, she shows how this mysterious act of violence has loomed over all those affected for generations, shaping their fears, fates, and the stories they tell about themselves.
“The Prettiest Star” by Carter Sickels.
Small-town Appalachia doesn’t have a lot going for it, but it’s where Brian is from, where his family is, and where he’s chosen to return to die. At eighteen, Brian, like so many other promising young gay men, arrived in New York City without much more than a love for the freedom and release from his past that it promised. It is a novel that speaks to the question of what home and family means when we try to forge a life for ourselves in a world that can be harsh and unpredictable.
“When These Mountains Burn” by David Joy.
When his addict son gets in deep with his dealer, it takes everything Raymond Mathis has to bail him out of trouble one last time. Frustrated by the slow pace and limitations of the law, Raymond decides to take matters into his own hands. For months, the DEA has been chasing the drug supply in the mountains to no avail, when a lead sets one agent on a path to crack the case wide open … but he’ll need help from the most unexpected quarter. As chance brings together these men from different sides of a relentless epidemic, each may come to find that his opportunity for redemption lies with the others.
“Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy” edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll.
J. D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” has defined Appalachia for much of the nation. “Appalachian Reckoning” is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful. It allows Appalachians from varied backgrounds to tell their own diverse and complex stories through an imaginative blend of scholarship, prose, poetry, and photography. It provides a deeply personal portrait of a place that is at once culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American.
“Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America” by Eliza Griswold.
Griswold tells the story of the energy boom’s impact on a small town at the edge of Appalachia–and one woman’s transformation from a struggling single parent to an unlikely activist. Stacey Haney is a local nurse working hard to raise two kids and keep up her small farm when the fracking industry comes to her hometown of Amity, Pennsylvania. When mysterious illnesses begin to afflict her children, she appeals to the company for help. Its representatives insist that nothing is wrong. Soon a community that has long been suspicious of outsiders faces wrenching new questions about who is responsible for redressing their ills. Griswold reveals what happens when an imperiled town faces a crisis of values.
If you still are needing to put yourself on hold for one of our many copies of “Hillbilly Elegy,” you can do so by logging into your library account and placing a hold from there or give us a call and we can place that hold for you. We have one copy of the large print book with two more on order. If you are wanting a “standard” print option, we have seven copies. Want to listen to it? We have one copy of the book on CD and three digital audio book copies available through Sunflower eLibrary.
Manhattan Public Library is a cornerstone of free and equal access to a world of ideas and information for the Manhattan, Kansas, community. Manhattan Public Library serves more than 75,000 people in the Riley County area through curated book and other media collections, knowledgeable staff, relevant programming for all ages, and meeting space. Learn more at mhklibrary.org.
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Audrey Swartz, Adult Services and Readers’ Advisory Librarian