Wayne Derek Quarles wins no sainthood awards. Within the span of a week, his malevolence causes him to lose his job, his Hummer, and his wife. On his way to visit an elderly great-uncle in tiny Union, West Virginia, Wayne's life turns even more wretched as injuries force him to stay for awhile.At his new home and while convalescing, Wayne learns of an ancestor who left his native Monroe County, Virginia and returns home wounded and angry, now living in a new state, West Virginia. Wa...

Books with names about famous trains are frequently written by historians and are filled with endless facts such as ridership figures, equipment types, and servicedetails. This is not one of those books.Instead, Chasing the Powhatan Arrow is a fresh look at the people, communities, and issues affecting the population outside the train along its 600-plus mile route. This book presents a wide range of issues, including the history of tobacco, coal mining, and the Civil War to c...

Sammy Reisinger is a 17-year old violin prodigy from a wealthy New Jersey family. She has inherited a priceless Cremonese violin and she is schooled in the classics. Becoming enamored with traditional Appalachian music, she decides to visit the venerable Old Fiddlers Convention in Galax, Virginia. While there, disaster strikes, leaving her seemingly trapped and orphaned. This is the story of how she and her tiny host community deal with an epic disaster.

When Marjorie Taliaferro's beloved twin sister Sally Taliaferro Bradley is stricken with breast cancer, it's tragic enough. But when the governorship of the Commonwealth of Virginia, a position she rightfully deserves, is wrested from her during her infirmity, it is an action that cannot stand. Marjorie and her life partner Liza Randolph, along with a cadre of supporters, lay forth plans to recapture Sally's lawful position and along with it a measure of fair governance to the state.

Southern West Virginia is one of the poorest areas in America. With the collapse of coal mining industry jobs beginning in the 1950s and continuing to today, thousands of people have left, leaving behind a society marked by poverty, malnutrition, and drug abuse.A new scourge has emerged literally on the horizon: mountaintop removal mining. This assault on the landscape and the remaining people has been complete, with poisoned water, fouled air, decimated wildlife, and the utter dest...

IN 2004 THE VIRGINIA STATE LEGISLATURE issued a proclamation declaring a series of roads throughout the southwestern part of the state to be the Virginia Heritage Music Trail, to showcase the traditional Appalachian music whose roots permeated the culture. They nicknamed it The Crooked Road.The music had been there since the arrival of the first European and African immigrants, but the initiative gave it a geographic focus. The Crooked Road has since become one of the nation's most ...

In his new collection of poetry and abstract paintings, Michael Falugi, evokes poetic images through his words and paintings, where fantasy and reality intertwine in a seamless fashion.His poetry and paintings are filled with stunning imagery - both unique and natural. The distinctiveness of his images gives his poetry a curious kind of clarity. Falugi finds his way between fantasy and reality, with his gift to capture memorable, fleeting moments, where everything is uncommon and n...

In the vein of Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, with a dash of some of the homegrown nostalgia of The Dangerous Book for Boys and A Prairie Home Companion, humorist Philip Gulley (Front Porch Tales, Home to Harmony) tells of his coming of age in small-town Indiana.It was a time of questionable role models, half-baked schemes, and unrelieved and happy chaos.Small Town Indiana: From aggravating the police dog at the county jail t...

Back then the big old house was heated with an old coal furnace. One of my winter chores each morning before walking to school, which was only one block away, was to go down to the basement and shovel coal into the furnace fire box from the coal bin. It was a big responsibility for a six year old boy.

**A New York Times Notable Book for 2011One of Entertainment Weekly's Top 10 Nonfiction Books of the Year 2011A Time Magazine Top 10 Nonfiction book of 2011A Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of 2011One of Library Journal's Best Books of 2011**A sharp-eyed, uniquely humane tour of America's cultural landscape—from high to low to lower than low—by the award-winning young star of the literary nonfiction...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "James and Deborah Fallows have always moved to where history is being made.... They have an excellent sense of where world-shaping events are taking place at any moment" —The New York Times • The basis for the HBO documentary streaming on HBO MaxFor five years, James and Deborah Fallows have travelled across America in a single-engine prop airplane. Visiting dozens of towns, the America they saw is acutely conscious of its problems—f...

A woman physician confronts the moral issues of her time in the third novel in the New York Times –bestselling author's historical medical trilogy—"Perhaps Gordon's best work so far . . . R.J. is a heroine worth caring about" ( Kirkus Reviews ).Roberta Jeanne d'Arc Cole is favored to be named associate chief of medicine at a Boston hospital. She is married to a surgeon. They own ...