Two More Kinds Of Sorghum/Molasses You Shouldn't Bother To Buy!

Spring Valley Farms Sorghum--Photo by Roger D. Hicks

On March 10, 2019, I wrote my first blog post about sorghum, or molasses, whichever  you prefer and it quickly became a favorite post of some of my readers both because some of them love sorghum and because some of them knew little or nothing about sorghum and were willing to try to take on a new culinary experience, especially one that was historical in Appalachia.  I eat sorghum nearly every morning in my oatmeal which I have eaten nearly every day for more than a year following a drastic change in my diet by which I nearly totally eliminated pork, beef, eggs, and milk.  I have benefited greatly from the change in terms of weight loss, lowered blood pressure, lowered cholesterol, and other improvements in nearly every metric used to assess health care.  I should also add that I have adhered strictly to a daily exercise program for more than sixteen months.  In that first post,  I compared three brands of sorghum, one made in my home county in Eastern Kentucky, another concocted in Western Kentucky, and a third from Tennessee.  While all three of those were acceptable, I made it clear that my own personal choice was Holbrook Brothers Sorghum from my hometown of West Liberty, Kentucky. They have consistently made the best sorghum I know for more than twenty years and in a bow to modern technology even have a Facebook page.    

But I suppose I am repeating myself about my favorite sorghum which I admit I am likely to do again until someone can show me a better brand.  If you happen to believe you make the best sorghum in the world, send me a jar and I will try it, write about it no matter what my opinion is, and gladly tell the world if yours is actually as good as you believe.  But now let's get to the two most recent brands I have tried and I will tell you why I believe I am doing you, dear reader, a favor by telling you to never buy or try either of them.  I have to admit that I had to toss a coin to decide which photo to post first and which sorghum to discuss first.  I do not look forward to talking about either or them.  But I spent my money for a jar of each, ate the contents despite my misgivings and my immediate desire to go out and find a better brand.  I also must admit that I regretted the fact that I do not own hogs so I could have poured the contents of both jars in a slop bucket and further remind the porkers of their low state in a short existence.  

The first brand we will discuss is Spring Valley Farms 100% Pure Sorghum which I bought in a 22 ounce jar.  At least they sell theirs in a jar which can be reused, with a new lid, to can something better to eat.  Spring Valley Farms sorghum is made in Caneyville, KY, which is located in Grayson County Kentucky which is located in West Central Kentucky.  Grayson County Kentucky is about 200 miles to the west of my area and, as we say around here, it is in the flat land.  First and foremost, I have to admit that I did not expect great results when I bought the sorghum in my local Save A Lot store which is one of a chain of about 1300 stores in 36 states.    No chain that large usually buys any product from a small, family owned local producer.  Those kinds of producers just cannot handle the volume a chain grocer would demand.  And the best sorghum almost always comes from a small, local, family owned operation where the owner is seen stirring syrup over a hot fire in early fall.  But I bought it.  I ate it.  Now I have to say what I found and that was a typical mass produced sorghum which was not cooked down long enough to be thick, dark, rich, and sweet.  Mass producers do not ever want to see their employees burn an overly large batch of syrup.  But Spring Valley Farms insist on their pre-printed label that it is "A Habegger Family Tradition".  I am willing to concede that this is an honest statement and the operation is owned by one family.  But I am also willing to bet that the operation is large enough that nobody named Habegger is cutting cane, stirring syrup, or capping jars.  Spring Valley Farms is selling more than two dozen different products in mass produced jars and you can bet your bippie that work of that magnitude is not being done by members of a family.  Don't bother buying their products unless you are firmly convinced that mass production is a great thing. 

Grandma's Molasses--Photo by Roger D. Hicks

The other brand of sorghum, excuse me--molasses, I bought was Grandma's Molasses Unsulphured Original in a 12 ounce glass jar.  It is a darker color than most mass produced sorghum or molasses and is actually produced or sold by B & G Foods in Parsippany, New Jersey.  Oh My God, Did I Say New Jersey???  Sadly, I did.  More than 25 years ago, I used to do pre-release home visits all over New Jersey with juveniles in institutional placements.  I have driven thousands of miles across New Jersey and I remember how surprised I was one day somewhere in Northern New Jersey when I actually saw a cow.  I can assure you that New Jersey is no longer "The Garden State".  That perpetually questionable source of all information for people in a hurry, Wikipedia, says that:

"B&G Foods is a holding company for branded foods. It was founded in 1889 to sell pickles, relish and condiments. The B&G name is from the Bloch and Guggenheimer families, sellers of pickles in Manhattan. It is based in Parsippany, New Jersey and has about 2,500 employees."  (Wikipedia, accessed on June 8, 2019, at 3: 37pm.)

What B & G Foods says about themselves on their website is:

"Today, our family of brands includes more than 50 well-known and loved brands that we offer throughout the United States, Canada and internationally and our commitment to food safety and quality remains our number one priority." (B & G Foods, https://www.bgfoods.com/about  Accessed on June 8, 2019, at 3:39pm)

Based on that glorious, self-aggrandizing description, you can clearly understand that B & G Foods does not manufacture foods.  They buy products by the tractor trailer or rail car load and, at most, run bottling and canning factories where those mass produced products are blended, bottled, canned, shipped, and sold to the world.  The taste of their "Grandma's Molasses Unsulphured Original" is heavy, crude, dark, undesirable, and should never cross my lips again.  I suspect if you have a constipated baby you could put a spoon full of this concoction in the little whipper snapper's bottle and expect results before the night is out.  But whatever you do, don't inflict this stuff on yourself.  Go to a county fair, farmer's market, or road side stand and buy a nice mellow, dark, sweet, wonderful jar of homemade sorghum from somebody whose name has been scrawled on a glue backed label and pasted to a jar, carried down the lane from the sorghum mill, and placed on a table beside an old state highway with a three or four digit number.  Dip your finger in that jar, listen to the bluebirds sing, and lick it slowly off your fingers before you drive home knowing those big fluffy cat head biscuits you will be baking will be a wonderful dessert at the end of a big country breakfast tomorrow!   

"Memoir" by Robert Hicks--Book/Manuscript Review

Robert Hicks, Photo by UMWA Local 5895

For those of you who ever actually read the list of "Books I Have Read Lately" which has been located at the bottom of the page on this blog ever since I have been blogging, you might have noticed lately that I had added "Memoir" by Robert Hicks to that list of books.  I used the term "book" somewhat expansively in reference to that particular work as I sometimes to do documents, manuscripts, and other unpublished sources of information which I believe could be useful to another student of Appalachian Studies or of some particular subject covered by some writing I have read.  I have always hoped that at least a few of my readers might choose from time to time to read some of these listings.  This particular manuscript can only be found in one place on earth so far as I know and that is the Wayland Historical Society in Wayland, Kentucky, where I have been doing some research recently.  If you decide to try to locate and read this manuscript, you will need to travel to Wayland to see it.  But the bright side is that the Historical Society has a relatively broad policy about access to their holdings and the copying of those holdings.  

I had two different reasons for choosing to read this 50 page manuscript: 1) my ongoing research involves the town of Wayland and the Elkhorn Coal Company which built the town and owned it until about 1970; 2) Robert Hicks was a distant cousin of mine and was raised in a holler called Bruce near Mousie, Kentucky, where my father was also raised.  Robert Hicks served as the fifth president of UMWA Local 5895 in Wayland, KY, and his son, Bobby Ray Hicks, still serves as president of Local 1741 which was merged with Local 5895 sometime after coal mining ended in Wayland and the number of active UMWA members dwindled. As his biography in "Twentieth Anniversary...of Local Union 5895 United Mine Workers Of America 1933-1953" states: "Robert Hicks started work in the mines...in 1919" and served his local union, the town of Wayland, and the greater community in a variety of ways as Financial Secretary and President of Local 5895 and as Police Judge of the City of Wayland.  

When I read this memoir, I was able to learn some previously unknown information about my extended family and the area in Mousie where they lived and many of them are buried.  I also learned more about a man named John "Bud" Wicker who had been a school teacher and elected official in the area around the turn of the twentieth century.  This was particularly important to me since a treasured family member who developed dementia late in life had fixated on John "Bud" Wicker at times during the severe deterioration of their dementia.  As a well known and well loved caretaker would walk through the house this person would often say, "There comes that SOB John "Bud" Wicker".  Their caretakers knew nothing of John "Bud" Wicker but I had at least heard of him during my childhood and knew that he had been well respected in the county.  His photo and a warm remembrance of him is included in the memoir and I immediately copied that page and mailed it to the caretaker of my family member.  It seems that the family member, in their dementia, had fixated on their old grade school teacher after they could no longer recognize their caretaker and we all found it quite humorous as some of these dementia stories can be.  Secondly, I was able to learn the original source of one bit of information about my paternal grandfather, Charlie Hicks, which I had found repeated in another more questionable source.  Robert Hicks had also included in the memoir other somewhat more lengthy information about my grandparents: 

"I remember on several occasions, Joe and I would go up to Uncle Charlie and Aunt Betty's to stay all night.  Uncle Charlie was somewhat of a rhyme maker.  He was all the time making a rhyme on someone and we just loved to hear him.  Aunt Betty was always working with her loom weaving cloth to make her children clothes, or she would be spinning wool on her old spinning wheel to make wool thread to knit their stockings.  She was also one of the old midwives who caught babies from under persimmon trees, or got them out from among Uncle Charlie's bee gum stands.  Uncle Charlie was always talking about his "honey money" and his old woman.  He must have had at least seventy five bee gums and an old mule called Jim.  He would start out on Old Jim and say, "Come on Jim, we're going to Lackey or maybe Garrett."  He would start out singing "Tell Mother I'll Be There".  That's an old Baptist song.  At breakfast he would have a big bowl of honey and we boys didn't care too much for honey.  All we wanted was that big bowl of gravy.  I think that gravy was the greatest thing the old people ever learned to fix.  It it hadn't been for gravy, many folks would have starved to death.  We would eat every bit of it and even scrape the skillet clean.  That was a big skillet too."  (Robert Hicks, "Memoir" page 7)

It was wonderful for me to read that somewhat lengthy remembrance of the paternal grandparents I had never known personally or heard hat story in its entirety.  I had known that Grandma Betty was a midwife until she was about seventy-five and I had also known that  Grandpa Charlie kept seventy-five or a hundred stands of bees until he was about eighty and peddled honey among the coal camps by mule back even at that advanced age.  It also reminded me of a story my father Ballard Hicks used to tell about going to Jackson in his childhood with Grandpa Charlie and at least one of his brothers.  It was the first time they had seen cement sidewalks and Daddy always said that his brother kept looking at the poured concrete sections of the sidewalk until he finally said, "I sure wish I knowed where they got these big flat rocks.  Pap could sure use some of them to set his bee gums on."  

Elizabeth "Betty" & Charlie Hicks

Robert Hicks also made one short reference to my maternal great-grandfather Hence Hicks, who was murdered in 1935, by saying that he had been an oxen driver in a local logging or farming operation.  But he only made one short reference to the United Mine Workers of America to which he apparently had devoted several years of his life and had obviously inculcated union thinking into his son to the point that Bobby Ray Hicks also became a UMWA official.  That failure to discuss the UMWA left the readers of his memoir without many key elements of his life's work I am certain.  But this book is well written with only minimal linguistic errors considering it was written by a relatively uneducated man.  That skillful writing is also one more testament to the fact that the Hicks genes seem to carry some propensity for producing people who like to write or "make a rhyme" as my grandfather, father, and myself have done along with Robert Hicks.  If you are a descendant of some of the Hicks family living around Mousie Kentucky, you will benefit from making a trip to the Wayland Historical Society and reading the "Memoir" of Robert Hicks. 

"The Nick Adams Stories" by Ernest Hemingway--Book Review

Hemingway, Ernest. The Nick Adams Stories. (New York, NY, Bantam Books, 1972)

This has always been one of my favorite books and this is the second or third time I have read it from cover to cover.  I have probably read a few of the individual short stories in this collection such as "Indian Camp", "Big Two-Hearted River", and "The Last Good Country" a dozen times or more.  This book shows a side of Hemingway that is not the commonly understood man and writer in many ways.  The 24  stories are divided into five sections and arranged in something close to the chronological order in which they were written.  The sections, in order, are called "The Northern Woods", "On His Own", "War", "A Soldier Home", and "Company Of Two".  These sections are intended to present the stories as they fit into the key segments of Hemingway's life and also correspond fairly closely to the order in which they were written.  

The stories in "The Northern Woods" are all set in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the character Nick Adams after whom they are entitled is generally conceded to be primarily an autobiographical presentation of a youthful Hemingway in the home of his father.  "Indian Camp" has always been one of my favorite stories by any writer.  It is direct, brutal but realistic, and shows Hemingway approaching the issue of suicide which was a major family issue with his father, brother, and several other family members either attempting suicide or succeeding in ending their own lives.  The short story tells the story of the doctor, his son, and an uncle attending the birth of a child in the home of a Native American couple in the Upper Peninsula.  The woman's husband is bound to his bed by a recent injury and they  are actually in a set of bunk beds during the childbirth.  At the end of the procedure, the doctor discovers that the father has quietly committed suicide in the upper bunk as his child is being born immediately below him.  The dialogue at the end of the story is some of the most linguistically simple and yet brutally powerful you will ever find by an writer anywhere.  The boy asks, 

"Do many men kill themselves, Daddy?"  

"Not very many, Nick."

"Do many women?"

"Hardly ever."

"Don't they ever?"

"Oh yes. They do sometimes."

"Daddy?"

"Yes."

"Where did Uncle George go?"

"He'll turn up alright."

"Is dying hard, Daddy?"

"No, I think it's pretty easy, Nick.  It all depends." 

When we consider the fact that both Ernest and Clarence Hemingway died by suicide by gunshot, we can almost visualize Ernest Hemingway, in Ketchum, Idaho, in the early morning hours of July 2, 1961, replaying that very dialogue in his mind as he loaded his shotgun to end his life.  I have always suspected that this section of dialogue from "Indian Camp" may well be the most purely autobiographical words Hemingway ever wrote.  But the stories are not all that dark and Nick Adams and his fictional father are not overly dark characters.  Nick Adams love to fish, hunt, drink, and have sex and those are three of the areas of life in which Ernest Hemingway wrote at a level which few writers ever achieve.  Some of the hunting and fishing language in these stories is pure poetry.  the sexual language is totally devoid of all those socially unacceptable locker room words so often found in the work of lesser writers.  But when Hemingway wrote about sex, he did not leave  his readers to wonder what he was talking about.  His meanings are crystal clear.  His language is admirable and accurate.  When he writes about any of these three topics, you know you are reading the work of an individual who has done sufficient homework on his topics to be considered an expert and a connoisseur.

"The Last Good Country" is a fascinating story about Nick Adams on the run from two local game wardens as a teenager in the company of his younger sister who is going with him to protect him from himself and his dangerous tendencies.  They are hiding in the "...last good country..." in the Upper Peninsula with streams full of hungry trout, berries to pick, warm beds of vegetation in which to sleep safely, and far too much country for two fat, liquor loving game wardens to ever find them.  The relationship between the siblings borders on things which most readers would not appreciate and Hemingway never crosses any of the lines which would make the difference for reader.  But he walks directly up to those lines, stares across at his doubting readers, and leaves answers hanging in the air to be considered, doubted, appreciated, and never found in the open.  It is also a wonderful story.  

 "Big Two-Hearted River" is, perhaps, the best known story in this collection but I would not go so far as to declare it flatly the best.  It is a wonderful story and is also one of my favorite stories both from Hemingway and from the greater body of American literature.  It is, on the surface, a fishing story about an isolated section of river which Nick Adams loves to fish in the Upper Peninsula but it also about a soldier returning home from war and remembering his friends in the war.  The fishing sections of the story are some of the best written descriptions of fishing from any writer, anytime, anywhere.  Isaak Walton would have been proud to know this version of Hemingway.  It is also a great story about a solitary person in a very solitary situation in a wilderness.  This story is one of those which no person should ever say they are a well read aficionado of either Ernest Hemingway or American Literature without having read. 

While the Nick Adams stories are not always the first of Hemingway's writing we hear mentioned, they are well crafted, introspective, autobiographical stories by and, at least in part, about a very complicated man.  They are well worth reading and rereading. 

 

"The Autobiography Of John E. Buckingham Appalachian Financier" by John E. Buckingham, et. al---Book Review

John E. Buckingham was born in Paintsville, Kentucky, in 1874 and rose to power as a former student and loyal assistant to John C. C. Mayo, the individual who is generally given most credit for arranging the purchase, development, and eventual decline of the coal fields and the coal industry in the entire Big Sandy River Valley.  Buckingham served loyally as the most obvious right hand man to Mayo beginning shortly after Mayo began buying and selling thousands of acres of mineral rights in Kentucky under the notorious broad form deeds.  Buckingham was eventually listed as the president, CEO, or chief operating officer of a half dozen or so small banks in the coal towns, including Wayland, Blackey, Hi Hat, Paintsville, and other coal camp towns in the eastern region of Kentucky.  During the Great Depression, all of those banks except the one in Paintsville went bankrupt and were liquidated under the National Recovery Act.  Yet, amazingly, Buckingham was elected to both the presidency of the Kentucky Bankers Association and the office of State Treasurer of Kentucky.  He had a street named after him in the coal town of Van Lear, Kentucky, which is most famous for having been the hometown of both Loretta Lynn and her sister, Crystal Gale.  Buckingham Mountain, which is located on the ridge which separates Right Beaver Creek from Left Beaver Creek, is also named for John E. Buckingham.

Buckingham wrote an autobiography which is entitled “The Autobiography of John E. Buckingham, Appalachian Financier,”  and was originally published under the auspices of a vanity press during Buckingham’s lifetime and was eventually republished with a second vanity press, Gateway Press, Incorporated, in 2008.  The book was rereleased in 2008 from Gateway Press with the names of Robert M. Conley as editor and John Buckingham Browning as “consultant”.  Browning is the grandson and namesake of John E. Buckingham.  The book does give some first-person insight into the life and accomplishments of John C. C. Mayo and John E. Buckingham.  But any reader should approach it with a jaundiced eye.  Other than the Paintsville bank, which survived the depression by being merged into another institution, Buckingham did not mention by name a single one of the other banks which collapsed during the depression.  He also only used the term “depression” only once in the book and always referred to that horrible period in American history by the somewhat bleached out misnomer of “the panic of 1929”.  Buckingham also discusses several other economic failures in coal mining, lumbering, oil, and gas in terms which are clearly intended to portray both himself and John C. C. Mayo in charitable terms regardless of the topic. The book was obviously a major attempt to self-aggrandize in an apparent attempt to leave a lasting favorable impression of the author on his readership.  The book was also only very superficially edited and is replete with errors of spelling, grammar, and syntax. 

A Call For Gun Control In Appalachia In 1941

The attached news story below was taken from the Floyd County Times of April 10, 1941, just a little over 78 years ago.  I was quite pleased to find it in a county newspaper anywhere in Appalachia but even more pleased to find it in the primary local newspaper I read as a boy in Floyd County Kentucky, the county in which I spent the first 6 years of life and one which has played a significant role in the lives of myself and my entire extended family since the day my third great-grandfather Aulse Hicks immigrated to the area from Western Virginia sometime between 1790 and 1810.

Floyd County Times, January 2, 1941

In his charge to the Floyd Circuit Court grand jury a few days before the story made the paper, Floyd Circuit Judge Henry Stephens, Jr. stated "Reduce the carrying of pistols, and you reduce murder. I desire that the grand jury investigate all  classes and kinds of crime and especially the carrying of concealed deadly weapons.  Thousands of dollars could be saved in Kentucky through the circuit courts, if the law was such that the first offense of carrying a concealed deadly weapon was punishable by from one to five years in the state reformatory."  Judge Stephens was correct in this statement in 1941 and he is still correct today more than 78 years after he said these words in his charge to the grand jury.

Five of the twenty worst states in America, based on their per capita gun deaths by 100,000 citizens, are wholly or partially in Central and Southern Appalachia.   Alabama, whose Northeastern region in the area of Sand Mountain, is the fourth worst state in the union for gun deaths with 17.6 gun deaths annually per 100,000 citizens.  Tennessee, where nearly the entire eastern half of the state is Appalachian, is 10th worst with 16.4 gun deaths yearly per 100,000 residents.  West Virginia, which is wholly in Central and Southern Appalachia, is 13th worst with 14.3 gun deaths per 100,000 citizens.  Kentucky, which has nearly all the eastern half of the state in Central and Southern Appalachia, is 17th worst in the nation with 13.7 deaths for each 100,000 potential living victims in the commonwealth.  Georgia, whose northeastern counties are in Central and Southern Appalachia, has 12.6 gun deaths per 100,000 residents and is the 19th worst state in the nation for gun deaths.  These are deplorable and indefensible statistics if we are honest about the issue of the horrible need for comprehensive federal gun control legislation.  The number of lives which could be saved all across the nation, not just in Appalachia, with such legislation would be worth far more than enough in human life, legal costs, and total lives saved to more than justify the uproar which such rational and well justified humane legislation would engender.  The 2nd Amendment does not guarantee the right to unrestricted ownership of weapons as groups such as the NRA would have you believe.  It guarantees the right to "well regulated" ownership of guns and, if we are honest, we know that guns have never been well regulated in America.  It is long past time for us to work to make Judge Stephens' dream come true.   

"Public Health In Appalachia Essays From The Clinic And The Field" Edited by Wendy Welch--Book Review

Welch, Wendy, Editor: Public Health In Appalachia Essays From The Clinic And The Field (Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland And Company, 2014)

This book is one work in a series of books from McFarland and Company in Jefferson, North Carolina, called the Contributions To Southern Appalachian Studies series which in the last twenty years has produced roughly forty books.  It is a book I should have read and written about promptly after it was published in 2014 since one article in the book quotes substantially from an article which I co-authored in 2005 with Dr. Heather Ambrose, Ph.D. on the topic of "Culturally Appropriate Counseling and Human Services in Appalachia: The Need and How to Address It" which was published online by the American Counseling Association and which we delivered in a presentation at the 2005 National Conference of the ACA.  However, that quotation and citation is not the best reason for me or anyone else to read this book.  The real reason you should read it is that it is a compilation of ten very cogent and informative essays written by more than a dozen human services and/or education professionals in the Central and Southern Appalachian region.  The subtitle, "Essays From The Clinic And The Field", explains very aptly why I consider this book to be a fine resource for human services and education professionals working in the region.  It is taken directly from the mouths of more a dozen of the "horses" who have been pulling the load in some very tough professions in the region and who clearly demonstrate their professional skills and cultural competence in their writing.  

In the opening paragraph of the Foreword, John Dreyzehner addresses one of my pet peeves for nearly all my life which I have always confronted in the header to this blog.  Mr. Dreyzehner has begun his introduction to the book by saying: 

"Many years ago a young college student from Chicago signed up for a brief Catholic mission experience deep in rural Appalachia.  One of the first things the ignorant young man noticed was that the locals and the host clergy didn't pronounce "Appalachia" right.  What they said sounded more like "apple-AT-cha".  Fortunately, he did not try to correct them, nor they, more kindly, he in saying "app-a-LAY-cha".  That was the beginning of an education in cultural sensitivity and cultural literacy.  There was a lot to learn." (Dreyzehner, Public Health In Appalachia Essays from the Clinic and the Field, p. 1)

I cannot think of a finer way for any non-native resident of Appalachia to begin a discussion of the region.  My own aforementioned header to this blog uses nearly identical words to address the same topic:

"An ever growing site of non-fiction,flotsam, fiction,memoir,autobiography,literature,history, ethnography, and book reviews about Appalachia, Appalachian Culture, and how to keep it alive!!! Also,how to pronounce the word: Ap-uh-latch-uh. Billy Ed Wheeler said that his mother always said,"Billy, if you don't quit, I'm going to throw this APPLE AT CHA" Those two ways are correct. All The Others Are Wrong." (Roger D. Hicks, see above)

This book makes a meritorious attempt in several of the articles to address that need for cultural competency and the same article which quotes my work, written by Bob Franko, also quotes and cites  the work of my friend and mentor Loyal Jones from his book "Appalachian Values" on which I have based much of my writings about the need for cultural competence in writing about or working in Central and Southern Appalachia.  It was quite refreshing to see anyone directly addressing the widespread and deliberate mispronunciation of the name of our homeland.  One of my very early blog posts,  and I am proud to say one of the most frequently read on this blog, directly addressed this issue.  I also frequently mention the excellent, early Appal Shop movie "Strangers and Kin: A History of the Hillbilly Image", which is one of finest attempts ever made to address the negative attacks on Appalachia and Appalachians.  Those of us who have fought this battle for most of our lives can truly appreciate the effort by Franko and Dreyzehner.

But there are numerous other reasons to appreciate this book and the greater series from McFarland and Company.  Nearly every article in the book has direct applications for both professionals working in the region and native Appalachian who simply want to be understood by the greater America around us as an unappreciated and frequently maligned minority which are generally denied minority status.  The first section of the book contains four articles which address a quartet of the most serious problems facing the region today: cancer, diabetes, drug addiction, and inadequate dental care. The second section is comprised of three articles about culturally appropriate health care delivery systems.  All three of these articles are well written by individuals who understand exactly what they are talking about.  Steve North, M. D. wrote a very good article about telehealth in Appalachia.  But I must take offense with the general need for telehealth in Appalachia or anywhere else in a country which mistakenly claims to be the most advanced in the world.  I am still offended that in America we have reached a time where it is necessary for people in any part of the country to participate in telehealth in order to participate in the health care system.  I also take offense when I am seen at one of the best hospitals in the entire southeast and I am unable to see a person who is actually a medical doctor.  I have worked with and know several highly qualified nurse practitioners and physicians assistants but I will never believe that this country could not, if politicians and health care administrators would allow it, produce a health care system in which every patient would meet with a physician at the moment of initial contact.  Such a system would require us, as a nation, to actually create new systems of taxation, education, and healthcare delivery. Such a system would allow every qualified applicant to be accepted into a medical school without fear of losing their future freedom of choice because of paying off education loans.  Other countries with far less average gross domestic product pay for a college education for every qualified applicant.  We should also.  If those applicants choose to become nurse practitioners or physicians assistants instead of becoming doctors, we should support them just the same.  A free public college education for every qualified applicant in America would vastly increase our gross domestic product, average income, and general effectiveness as a nation.  But for the time being, I do admit that the current system of using medical practitioners who are less qualified than full medical doctors does give us the ability to delivery minimally effective health care to the greatest number of patients especially in remote areas of Appalachia, the Deep South, and the far west.  But it should never be accepted as the best or most widely used system. 

The third section of the book contains three articles on cultural theory and clinical policy.  One of those articles written by Tauna Gulley, RN, on fatalism and its effects on Appalachian youth.  Fatalism is one of the old topics which has been repeatedly used as a club with which to beat Appalachia and Appalachians.  In my opinion, this article could have been left on the cutting room floor and the overall book would have been better.  Fatalism is an easy place to fall back on if an author is attempting to continue the denigration, defamation, and defeat of Appalachia.  It is not nearly as prevalent or important as some people believe. At the time of publication of this book, Ms Gulley was a professor of nursing at the University of Virginia College at Wise.  Today, she is the coordinator of a nursing program at the University of Pikeville and apparently now holds a doctoral degree.  I do not know her or her educational or personal background.  But it has generally been my experience that the topics of fatalism, familism, and internecine squabbles, when used in reference to Appalachia are most generally used by non-natives of the region as a way to justify  what they mistakenly believe to be our shortcomings as a people and a region. 

Do not allow the couple of negative assessments I have made of individual articles to overly color your opinions of this book.  The strengths of the work strongly overcome any weaknesses a couple of articles may exhibit.  Read the book and benefit from it.  Read it with a critical eye and use the parts of it you are willing to accept at face value.  Use the parts with which you disagree to broaden your own knowledge base about how to overcome or counterbalance the alleged weaknesses those authors may discuss.  And realize that the opinions of any particular author may well not represent those of the editor or the other authors.  This is a book from which to learn. It is a tool.  Use it wisely! 

"Fahrenheit 451" By Ray Bradbury--Book Review

Ray Bradbury--Photo by britishfantasysociety.org

Reading "Fahrenheit 451" represents a return to reading dystopian literature for me which I have done intermittently since November 8, 2016.  In that time span I have read and posted about "1984" and "Animal Farm"  by George Orwell.  I have also attempted to maintain my regular reading list of Appalachian and general great literature but it has become increasingly more difficult to do so as the current illegitimate occupant of the White House has steadily veered farther toward compliance with his Russian Owner Vladimir Putin's wishes and attempted to force the country into a dystopian and Fascist bent in line with his own craving for illegitimate power and in response to his own seriously dangerous mental illness.  In many ways, this rereading of "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradury has been a pleasant return to a genuine classic of American Literature which I first read in my youth more than fifty years ago less than a decade after its original publication.  But the necessity of reading dystopian literature which has been forced on me and millions of other Americans by a treasonous band of Russian Agents who have managed, with the assistance of Vladimir Putin and his hackers, to seize the US White House has been a terrifying experience which those of us who actually value American Democracy have lived every day since November 8, 2016.  

But let's just get to the book in question and why it is a book you should also be reading with particularly close attention today.  "Fahrenheit 451" is a classic American novel which has generally been considered to be within the broad field of science fiction since its author, Ray Bradbury, was an acknowledged master of science fiction.  But it is bigger than one genre, any genre, since it has truly become one of the most important novels in the much broader field of American Letters.  It is also one of the acknowledged most important books in the much narrower field of dystopian literature.  As Bradbury says in an interview published in the Del Ray 50th Anniversary Edition of the novel, it did not start out, on its initial publication in 1953, as a bestseller or a potential classic. The hardcover first edition sold only 5,000 copies and the simultaneously published paperback sold about 50,000 copies.  Bradbury also sold a shorter version of the story to "Playboy" in the summer of 1953 for only four hundred dollars.  But over time, readers worldwide, especially politically and socially cogent readers turned it into one of the most widely read and bought books in all of American Literature.  It's place in all three of the genres I have mentioned above has been literally written in stone over the course of the last seven decades.  It is one of the greatest books in both science fiction and dystopian literature and will forever be solidly ensconced in the classics of all American Literature.  

Dystopian literature, especially dystopian fiction, is literature which examines the problem of governments which manipulate, control, and minimize their citizens often with overbearing, destructive, and invasive laws whose intent are to give the government absolute power and to homogenize the citizenry into a class of people without the power to resist the desires and goals of those in control of the government.  In "Fahrenheit 451", (the term is actually the temperature at which book paper burns), the United States has become a country in which books are banned, libraries have all been destroyed, and the people are mindless minions of the government whose lives are controlled by constant projections of government propaganda into their homes which often have every wall completely covered by large screens.  It is a crime to own and read books and the only job of the firemen, in a world where homes are all fireproof, is to find and burn books along with their owner's domiciles and, at times, even the owners.  The protagonist, Guy Montag, is a fireman who eventually begins to steal books from the homes which he is sent to burn, hides them in his home, and begins to read them.  Eventually, his wife and neighbors report his crimes and his own commander at the firehouse, Captain Beatty, brings the firetruck and firemen to burn Montag out.  But Montag manages to kill Beatty and escape into the countryside where a few well read resistors live on the lam constantly moving in small groups and working to memorize and save as many books and as much knowledge as possible.  The novel ends in a nuclear war which destroys the cities and leaves these resistors with their memorized knowledge to save the world.  This memorization of books and the knowledge contained therein is a reminder of the Polish Resistance during World War II who formed what they called Living Rosaries in which each member attempted to memorize as much of the Bible as possible in case the Nazis controlled the entire world and outlawed the Bible.  It is said that Pope John Paul II, known then as Karol Wojtyla, managed to memorize the entire Bible. 

Ray Bradbury was a masterful writer and this novel is composed of alternating uses of long, flowing complex sentences and other periods of short, staccato phrases which pop like gunfire or walnuts falling on a tin roof.  It is a wonderful use of the language to tell a story which must be told on a daily basis in a world rapidly veering toward the governmental terrorism which it relates.  While some less astute readers tend to read the book simply as a work of science fiction describing a world which will never occur, the thinking reader will find it to be just as terrifying as anything written in the last two hundred years in America.  Bradbury wrote the book less than decade after the end of World War II and in many ways it is a response to the Nazi attempt to gain control of the world via the Blitzkrieg and the Holocaust.  But he also foresaw the world of helicopter televised police chases more than forty years before O. J. Simpson was able to illegitimately seize America's attention in a white Ford Bronco. Bradbury also built much of the book out of his knowledge of how effectively the World War II resistance movement helped in the defeat of the Nazis and Adolph Hitler.  The resistors who memorize the books and hope to teach them to others are also rooted in groups of WWII resistors who formed secret groups to memorize the Bible in case the Nazis won the war.  One of those resistors was the future Pope John Paul II, Karol Wojtyla, as discussed above.   This is a book which every person should read and most can since it has been translated into more than thirty languages.  It is a book which has direct bearing today on what has happened in America since November 8, 2016, and should be seen as a lesson in just how rapidly a group of amoral, power hungry criminals can distract, divert, and destroy democracy even in the greatest country in the world.