Where is your nonfiction section please.
The podcast Appalachian Mysteria kicked off a few years ago by covering the 1970 murders of West Virginia University coeds Mared Malarik and Karen Ferrell. The two had hitchhiked back to their dorms after seeing Oliver! in the college town of Morgantown, West Virginia, and disappeared. Their headless bodies were found later in a nearby... Continue Reading →
Quite the mixed bag today, eh? Although I try to avoid hard reading goals or challenges, I do set myself a soft challenge of reading at least one big book of Russian history every year. It's one of my favorite genres anyway and there are so many that it's a good way to make sure... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Third Rainbow Girl, by Emma Copley Eisenberg (Amazon / Book Depository) Emma Copley Eisenberg looks back on her time in Appalachia, in West Virginia's rural Pocahontas County, and the connection to a notorious unsolved double murder of two young women that took place in the region in 1980. The women, Vicki Durian... Continue Reading →
Book review: American Overdose, by Chris McGreal Book Depository A former head of the Food and Drug Adminsitration has called America's opioid epidemic, "one of the greatest mistakes of modern medicine." It is neither a mistake nor the kind of catastrophe born of some ghastly accident. It is a tragedy forged by the capture of... Continue Reading →
Book review: Salvation on Sand Mountain, by Dennis Covington "Snake handling didn't originate back in the hills somewhere. It started when people came down from the hills to discover they were surrounded by a hostile and spiritually dead culture." At some point last year, I read an article, I think either about a preacher getting arrested or else bitten and... Continue Reading →
Book review: Bluegrass: A True Story of Murder in Small-Town Kentucky, by William Van Meter (Amazon / Book Depository) After finishing Hillbilly Elegy, I was still in the mood to read about Appalachia, so Bluegrass seemed a good option to check off my reading list. I'm not sure how I found it, but I love stories from the lesser known... Continue Reading →
Book review: Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance (Amazon / Book Depository) Hillbilly Elegy is the memoir of a still-young man looking back at his childhood and his family's migration from impoverished, seemingly hopeless Kentucky to a moderately more hopeful Ohio. But like the old Russian adage that if you try to drink your troubles away,... Continue Reading →
What's Nonfiction? 