79 Books Like Blue Ridge Commons

I love how this book turns the foundational stereotype of the backward, violent hillbilly, formed by the Hatfield-McCoy feud in 1880s West Virginia, on its head. There was friction between the two families after the Civil War, but both used courts rather than violence.

Then came the first railroad into the area in 1892, and with it came outsider capitalists intent on industrial coal mining and timbering through manipulation of political leaders. Conflicts over land and timber rights ignited the feud, as the Era of Deforestation and social destabilization in the Appalachians accelerated.  

I love this book because it recreates the globally unique original forests of the eastern U.S., now lost. From the 1920s through the 1940s, Braun traveled first by horse and buggy, then by Model T, from New England to Alabama, to document the original forests of the East. She particularly loved the Great Forest of the Southern Appalachians, the lushest, most biodiverse hardwood forests in the world.

She sought out the last virgin stands even as they were being logged, and as mighty American chestnut trees died out from blight. Perhaps her most surprising lesson was that not only does second-growth forest (not to mention 3rd, 4th, etc.) not indicate what originally grew there, but it can be completely misleading. 

The amazing photos and descriptions in the book absolutely stunned me. From 1880 to 1930, West Virginia went from being 95% forested with mostly virgin woods to 85% denuded, reflecting the fate of much of the Appalachian Mountain chain. In the early 1900s, the mill in Rainelle, WV, was the largest hardwood lumber plant in the world.

Clarkson tells this story through text and an amazing collection of photos, including of the largest tree ever cut in WV, in 1913: a white oak thirteen feet in diameter and estimated at 1,000 years old.

Outcries over damages from reckless timbering, followed by roaring fires and eroding floods, resulted in the Weeks Act of 1911, which authorized the U.S. Forest Service to purchase millions of acres of burning, eroding mountains for reforestation.  

This book gave me hope for the future of new old-growth, which is the Holy Grail of forest development. Like Lucy Braun’s book, it is an overview of eastern forests, but updated to contemporary conditions. Several essays focus on the Southern Appalachians and give easily understood ecological information on defining old-growth, the survival of remnant old-growth patches, old-growth characteristics like coarse woody debris, and invasive pests and diseases.

But the most important highlight is the role of forests as the largest terrestrial carbon storage, essential against climate change, and the older the forest, the more carbon it takes out of the air and sequesters. 

What can pain be when you are trying to be free? Who is safe from that when you are trying to be a compassionate person? This book will quell your questions. A girl with scares and scars. Do not be faint of heart on this one. And especially stay away from wells. Really. But also know there is that light that might free us all. 

This book causes the reader to rethink all that they have been taught regarding the colonial history and founding of our United States.

Did Thomas Jefferson actually plagiarize the Declaration of Independence based on a similar document from 1775 that was sent on horseback from Charlotte, N.C., to the constitutional convention in Philadelphia a full year earlier? I see ample evidence that makes for a strong argument, and this book is both an entertaining and historically based-account of a 250-year-old mystery.

I taught this book years ago while an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Written like a novel, although a serious work of history, it is not your usual book on Reconstruction. In compelling prose, Evans details the struggles of the Lowry Band of Lumbee Indians who clashed with Confederate officials in southeastern North Carolina during the Civil War. Henry Berry Lowry managed to escape after killing a rebel official. He took to the swamps, eluding capture with the help of local African Americans and Native Americans. It is a little-known story among people outside of that region and shows the complicated nature of putting the country back together again after a Civil War. I had never heard of this tribe until encountering the book and found the story unlike anything else in Reconstruction literature.

This atlas, a beautiful but money-losing coffee table book from the book-publishing arm of Southern Living, appeared just as a new CEO ordered the company’s book people to think of themselves “more in the direct-marketing business, as opposed to being a book publisher.” (This strategy led eventually to How to Cook for Your Man and Still Want to Look at Him Naked.) It was probably treated as a write-off from the beginning and not marketed at all, which is a shame, because it is much more than a handsome ornament for your living room. Three geographers and a historian, all from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, produced a solidly-researched and profoundly informative work of cartographic excellence, one that repays both casual browsing and close study. (Some used book sites incorrectly show a different cover, but don’t worry about that.)

David Joy writes contemporary crime in Appalachia with beauty, ferocity, and wit few can match. This was my first David Joy book and his first novel, but I’ve read everything he’s written since.

I love his books because of his focus on the intricacies of character and place in contemporary Appalachia that people outside the region don’t usually get to see. On top of that, his stuff is always suspenseful as all hell and full of tension. This one is a barn burner.

This book documents the wrongful conviction of Ronald Cotton while simultaneously relating the story of Jennifer Thompson, a victim of the brutal rape Cotton was convicted of.

I love this book because it’s co-authored by Cotton and Thompson and shows both sides of the damage of wrongful convictions: the wrongfully convicted person who goes to prison for a crime he did not commit and the victim who is denied closure. Cotton’s suffering is obvious and brutal, as he writes about the pain he went through being arrested, wrongfully identified, tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison plus 54 years.

Thompson’s suffering continues many years after the rape as she contends with the faulty identification procedures that caused the misidentification of Cotton.