Books like Lost, Buried, and Sunken Treasures of the Mid-West

I have always sought out the strange and unusual. This book covers many different phenomena. Whether it is ghosts, aliens, legends, cryptids, or just weird lore, this book has a wide scope. I live in the state and occasionally participate in investigations of these subjects. I even wrote a play Ghosts, Aliens, and Bigfoot. This book almost reminds me of being with my grandfather as a child. He loved to scare with local legends and ghost stories spun with his special brand of creepiness and humor. Reading this late at night took me back to those special times.

As if Illinois wasn’t weird enough. This book continues with local lore, legends, and unexplained from across the stream with Vincennes as my way point. It is apparent how much effort was put into researching these stories. Not only paranormal and cryptids are featured but, history and unique locations of interest are exhumed. The photography and graphics are top notch and lure the reader further into the book. Weird Illinois and Indiana are both works of art and full of stories to interest the most skeptical reader. 

Every marathoner needs hydration along the race. So it is with a long reading session. Some sessions call for a hot cup of coffee or tea. Some call for cocoa or a sparkling water or carbonated mix. Then there are times when a nice colorful glass of vino fit the occasion. I have always had an interest in chemistry and did quite well at it in school. This book was valuable to me as a newbie vintner. The author is English and he takes the reader through the process while giving tips and recipes and showing the equipment needed to produce your own unique beverage. The book is packed full of information about competitions and where to get supplies and which wines to make during the calendar year. It is an older book and references companies in England, but I would recommend it to anyone who might long to try… show more.

When you have no one in the world to count on, who do you turn to? You have no choice but to charge head-on into the breach. You have never been in trouble in your life and find that someone is suing you. People shake their heads and say that you will lose everything and walk away. This book gave a young man hope and a path to start on. I had to hire a lawyer, but this book prepared me for what to expect. The unknown is frightening. Knowing how the ‘game’ is played helped me to understand the process.

The book covers a broad spectrum of civil cases, but the reader can familiarize themselves with how things will proceed in their circumstance. I didn’t find any victorious solution to my situation, but it did stimulate my logical thinking and need to learn more about the legal process. It… show more.

This short story collection was a very influential book for me because it gave me permission to write about the people I know best. Bobbie Ann Mason’s Western Kentucky characters live just beyond the river from my native Illinois. In fact, my family came from Kentucky by way of Ohio. The characters in Shiloh are just as complicated as characters from urban areas. This book taught me how to write about my own small-town and rural folks.

Jim Klotter, Kentucky’s preeminent historian, takes an obscure nineteenth-century Kentucky Superior Court Judge, Richard Reid, and uses his life and death to understand the tragic ways southern honor forced men to prove themselves. John Jay Cornelison attacked Reid at his law Mount Sterling law office in 1884, setting off an unexpected series of events. Reid’s story reveals the conflicts between old, traditional southern ways, and the new urban, industrial order, and Klotter tells it masterfully. The book is filled with suspense and sharp analysis, but it is also a quick read.

I sat on my mother’s lap as a child to hear stories of her childhood in Appalachia—no running water or electricity, and the shame brought on by her mother’s escape from that hard life. The setting and the characterizations in Book Woman of Troublesome Creek brought back some of the memories of my mother’s stories.

I came to love the character’s adaptation to the harsh environment, their want for a better life, and the difference one person’s influence can make in a community. The spirit of survival, even with the hardest of circumstances, forced me to cherish this story. It was as if my mother had written this book or perhaps read it to me.

Bobi Conn’s story of growing up in poverty was too familiar: the cheap food, a car they push to start, a motel they move into when her father hits her mother, and the frustration of watching our mothers go back because they don’t have the courage to stay gone. Bobi also found refuge at school, which I related to because this was where life was predictable—and we were fed.

The author’s voice is powerful and honest as she shares her trauma, humiliation, and loss. Bobi Conn comes from the holler, deep in Appalachia, and her story is a beautiful testament to the resilience and bravery children are forced to have—and the childhood too many lose along the way.  

This was the first book I read written after 2000 that got modern life in Appalachia dead on right and it changed the way I looked at my own writing.

I love the way the past intersects with the present as Clay’s own life flirts with violence, all while he seeks the truth behind his mother’s death during his childhood. I was never sure where it was all headed until the final pages.

Booze books need not only to be filed all the way in the back of the bookstore in the “Food/Drink” section; the best deserve to be mainstream—and bestseller Pappyland proved that.

This is a dual memoir in some ways, following the rise, fall, and incredible rise again of the Van Winkle family and their grandfather Pappy’s vaunted and eponymous spirit, along with the story of Thompson reckoning with his own family lore and fatherhood.