"Birds' Eggs" by Michael Walters, A Great Little Reference Book For The Bird or Wildlife Watcher

 

I won't say that I am a "Bird Watcher" but I have fed birds on my property for years, own several bird related books, and can actually recognize and identify somewhere between 50 and 75 species.  I have owned this little book for about 20 years and received it when I was working in a facility for juvenile in the custody of the state and a charity gave enough copies of the book to the facility that every client and staff received a copy.  I have to admit that I have had few occasions to ever use it when I actually had a bird's nest or egg in sight to actually identify the bird.  But it is a fascinating book which is very dense in content and useful information.  It is published in a field guide size with water resistant pages and cover.  It would stand up to a lot of punishment in the field in the hands of a devoted bird watcher.  It was published in 1994 and sold at that time for $17.95 which was a stiff price for a book in those days 30 years ago.  It brags on the cover that it contains information about "500 bird species from around the world".  

It is well organized and beautifully illustrated with hundreds of photographs.  It has an introduction of about 25 pages which is broken into 8 or 9 short sections.  It is actually capable of turning an amateur into somewhat of an expert on the subject of bird eggs.  The first part of the introduction is labled "How This Book Works" which is a great way to start any reference book, and nowhere near enough reference books do that. Continuing the approach that the author knows he is dealing with probable amateurs, the next part of the introduction is labled, "What is an egg?"  How much more basic can you get?  The body of the book itself is broken into two major sections: "Non-passerines" and "Passerines" which will almost instantly provide many readers with a piece of information they did not have.  Passerine birds are those whose feet are adapted for perching on branches and other objects such as most song birds, raptors, etc.  Non-passerine birds are those arboreal birds such as pigeons, woodpeckers, and hummingbirds.  To be honest, it takes a bit of experience to distinguish instantly what the difference is between the two, but if you like birds and wildlife you will figure it out.   There is also a short glossary and a good index in the book which helps a great deal for the novice user.  

Each page of the book will have information about two or three birds and their eggs, and that information is clearly divided into separate sections on the page. 

These two pages are side by side (pages 94 and 95) and illustrate the varying number of birds and eggs which the book might have on a particular page.  The section for each bird contains a basic description of the bird, multiple photographs of their eggs, a short description of their breeding habits and a basic description of their range.  Yes, the book has information about numerous birds which the average reader will never see without going to a zoo where there will be no visible nests or eggs, or traveling the world with this and a general bird guide book in hand.  But it is an incredibly informative little book and fun to study, settle arguments with, and learn from for the person who believes like me that "there is no such thing as a useless piece of information...there is only information for which you do not currently have a use." 

I admit that the average reader who is not interested in knowing perhaps too much about birds might not be interested in this book.  But you can find it used on most used book websites for less than half of what it originally sold for and it is a fun toy for those days when you don't really want to "read" and just want to toy with an informative book with a lot of photographs. 

"Exploring The Abandoned Coal Towns of West Virginia The Southeastern Region" by Christina Paster--Book Review

This is a little book published by an entity called "America Through Time" which is an imprint of Arcadia Publishing. On their website, they described "America Through Time" as "a local and regional interest series that showcases the history and heritage of communities around the country. Using modern color photographs juxtaposed with old images, these titles capture a strong sense of the past while demonstrating the force of change through the passage of years". 

Arcadia Publishing is a company which publishes books primarily about communities across the country which are primarily collections of photographs assembled by individuals or groups in those communities who feel the need to preserve some of their local history.  I have read and written about one other book on this blog which that company published, "Images of America Floyd County" by Lisa Perry and the Wheelwright Historical Society.  It is a much better book than this one by Christina Paster.  It is my impression that Arcadia Publishing is essentially a vanity press which specializes in books about specific geographical settings, does little or no editorial work with the individuals and groups producing the books, and is simply in the business of making money from individuals and groups who are incapable of producing high quality work.  But let us get back to the book in question about the abandoned coal towns of West Virginia.  

 

The photographs compose probably 75% to 90% of the content of this book.  The book is broken into brief chapters about each of the eleven towns the author visited and photographed for the book.  There is a generally brief introduction to each chapter which is usually less than a full page with two exceptions, the discussion of Wheeling and Moundsville which I suspect are either the towns closest to the author's home or the towns she knows best.  The text is of very poor quality and shows absolutely no editorial supervision.  It is rife with grammatical errors of every type: incomplete sentences; sentence fragments; run on sentences; misspellings; errors in grammar, syntax, and tense.  It is very poor quality writing.  The photographs are marginally well done, bordering on the low end of professional level.  None of the photographs are particularly striking and a reasonably talented photographer could duplicate or better them with a low cost, hand held digital camera.  There are less than a half dozen mildly historical photographs included in the book with appropriate source crediting.  The author has also appended a brief section of end notes to support the few statements she has used from the work of others.  For those of you who have ties to or interest in one or more of the abandoned coal towns of West Virginia, I am adding a list of the eleven towns portrayed in the book so you can decide if you are interested enough to seek a copy for your inspection and, hopefully, your pleasure.  The town are Pocahontas, Whitesville, Itmann, Thurman, McDowell, Mullens, Alderson, Wheeling, Moundsville, Matoaka, and Nuttallburg.  If you have an interest, I would suggest that you attempt to locate a copy of the book in a library near you, inspect it, and then decide if you want to spend the money to buy a personal copy.  I do not want to induce you to feel you wasted your money on this particular book.  For my own personal and academic interests, the best book I have found about abandoned coal towns in general is "A Guide To Historic Coal Towns of the Big Sandy River Valley" by George D. Torok, which also covers a few of the coal towns of West Virginia despite its primary Eastern Kentucky focus.  It is well worth the money.  I can also recommend "Coal Camp Kids Coming Up Hard And Making It" by Barbara Ford Ritchie and published by Father and Son Publishing which has since been bought up by a larger company which continues to sell some of their titles.  But that book can be difficult to locate except a rare copy on used book websites.  On the Father and Son website it is listed at $75.00 which is a bit much for most people. 

"Images Of America Floyd County" by Lisa Perry and the Wheelwright Historical Society--Book Review

Perry, Lisa and the Wheelwright Historical Society: Images of America Floyd County (Charleston, SC, Arcadia Publishing, 2010)

While this book is wonderful in many ways for the person who is researching the history of Floyd County Kentucky or its coal camp towns, it falls short in being a comprehensive photographic history of the county.  I tend to believe that since it is a product of the Wheelwright Historical Society it was focused primarily on Wheelwright, coal mining, Left Beaver Creek, and the other coal camp towns in the county.  There are some wonderful photographs in this book and the best of those came from the collections of the National Archives, Alice Lloyd College, the Chesapeake and Ohio Historical Society, and the Wayland Historical Society where I have also done extensive research and written about in this blog on at least three occasions.  The photos from the National Archives are from the wonderful body of work by Russell Lee which are a part of the permanent collection at the archives in Washington, DC.  Lee shot most of his photographs which appear in this book over several days in the fall of 1946.  His work alone is well worth the price of the book.  His photographs in the book include shots of the major buildings in Wheelwright at the time, in the mine during work hours, and in the homes, churches, and recreation sites of the Wheelwright miners.  I do not laud Lee's work so heavily because I believe his work is the only above average work in the book.  I laud his work because it is generally exceptional by any professional photography standards.  The compilers of this book did a wonderful job of selecting most of the photographs.  But they also failed to include anywhere near enough photos from the northern section of the county in a book intended to bear the name of the entire county.  Perhaps such photos were just not available although I suspect the archives of the Floyd County Times could have produced a wide selection.  After having said all this about this book, I realize that the superficial reader of this blog post might jump to the mistaken conclusion that I don't like the book.  That is the farthest thing from the truth.

Like most other readers of the book who have any connection to Wheelwright, Floyd County, or coal camps in Eastern Kentucky, I found one or two connections to my own past in the handful of photographs taken at the Wheelwright public swimming pool.  When I was in my second summer of the Upward Bound Program at Alice Lloyd College, we students would be taken once a week by bus from Pippa Passes to Wheelwright for an afternoon of swimming in that pool which was the closest pool to the Alice Lloyd Campus large enough for the entire group.  I still have fond memories of that pool.  There are also a few good photos from Wayland in the period between 1920 and about 1950 which also stirred memories for me.

This book is well worth the price of admission if you are a former coal camp kid, former or current coal miner, or just someone who has become fascinated by the company towns which are widely spread across the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, Western Virginia, and East Tennessee.  Buy it!  Read those two or three paragraph introductions to the individual chapters!  Bask in whatever memories you have of the coal camp towns on both Left Beaver and Right Beaver in Floyd County.