"Flooded...Yet Knott Alone" by Miriam Moyer.

With the massive flooding and steadily rising death toll from the flood in Texas on July 4, 2025, I am certain that quite a few people might be interested in this book by Miriam Moyer, a Mennonie woman and writer who lives in Knott County. The book contains nearly fifty short chapters, which Moyer describes in the subtitle as "short stories of what Knott County people experienced in the July 28, 2022, flood." In spite of the large number of what I have called "chapters" and Moyer calls "short stories", the book is only 303 pages and is a fairly fast read if you don't allow yourself to be overcome by the constantly repititous stories of near death and survival by only a hairsbreadth. I met Moyer and bought the book in October 2024 at the Alice Lloyd College Appalachia Day where she was selling the book. Although I have numerous friends in the conservative Mennonite congregations in Knott, Johnson, and Morgan counties in Eastern Kentucky, I had never met Miriam Moyer until that day at Alice Lloyd. As a native of Knott County, I was interested in reading about the floods even though I had no direct contacts among the hundreds of victims who survived or the 19 dead from the flood. I always have a large "To Be Read" shelf of books and it is pure coincidence that I had started the book in time to complete it during the week of the Texas flood. The book is based on recorded interviews with numerous victims of the flood, local officials, recovery workers, and others in the county. I firmly believe that if Mirian Moyer still owns the recordings of those interviews they deserve to be placed in a legitimate historical library setting such as the Special Collections Department at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. Those interviews will be of significant interest to writers, researchers, and family members of victims for the entire foreseeable future. But I was disppointed to see that Moyer did not use a lot of direct quotations from the interviews in the book. Instead, she used very minimal direct quotes and paraphrased parts of what I assume were the recordings to compose the individual chapters. The book also has a strongly religious focus as does all writing I have ever read from members of conservative Mennonite congregations. I have no issue with that religious aspect of the book since it is universal in Mennonite books. But the book lacks a great deal of information of a first person historical nature from the interviewees themselves. The maanner in which the interviews were utilized to write the book leaves a great deal to be desired in the final product. But I give full credit to Miriam Moyer for the massive amount of time she spent traveling the county, interviewing the subjects, and making an attempt to preserve their stories of the disaster as it affected them. I would love to listen to the tape recordings or read transcripts of them. They deserve to be preserved in a stable setting where general access could be granted to researchers and the general public under controlled conditions. One other shortcoming of the book is that there is very limited information from survivors of the dead victims and no full listing of the Knott County dead. But the book is worth reading from most of the general public. It can be purchased directly from Miriam Moyer at this address which is published in the book: Miriam Moyer 4589 Possum Trot Road Leburn, KY 41831 606-497-6527