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A CHILDREN’S BOOK Dazzlin’ Dolly: The Songwriting, Hit-Singing, Guitar-Picking Dolly Parton by Suzanne Slade. New York: Calkins Creek/Astria Books for Young Readers, 2022. 40 pages, illustrated in full color by Edwin Fotheringham with a Timeline and Selected Bibliography. 9.25”X 11.5” hardback in dust jacket. This picture book begins with the humble birth of Dolly Parton in 1946 and ends when she moved to Nashville to pursue a music career right after graduating from Sevier County [Tennessee] High School. "Suzanne Slade weaves an engaging account of Dolly Parton’s music-filled childhood in the Tennessee mountains, her first appearance on the Grand Ole Opry as...

BOOKS FOR CHILDREN AND TEENS Holler of the Fireflies by David Barclay Moore. New York: Barzoi Books/Alfred A. Knopf/Random House Children’s Books/Penguin Random House, 2022. 360 pages. Hardback in dust jacket. This book is a Kirkus Reviews and Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year! The author, David Barclay Moore, is an African American native of Missouri now living in New York City. His first book, The Stars Beneath Our Feet, won the Coretta Scott King-John Steptoe New Talent Award. The protagonist of this youth novel is twelve-year-old Javari Harris, an African-American youth who lives in Brooklyn and is...

NON-FICTION   Enchanted Ground: The Spirit Room of Jonathan Koons by Sharon Hatfield. Athens: Swallow Press/ Ohio University Press, a 2022 paperback edition of a 2018 release. 342 pages with Index, Notes, Bibliography and illustrations. Trade paperback. The enchanted ground and the spirit room of this book’s title was a 16’ X 12’ cabin built by Jonathan Koons in the 1850s. There, Koons, a farmer in Athens County, Ohio, and his eight children gathered up to 20 people attracted by spiritualism and his reputation as a medium to seances accompanied by a cacophony of musical instruments where they heard voices...

NON-FICTION Doctoring the Devil: Notebooks of an Appalachian Conjure Man by Jake Richards. Newburyport, Massachusetts: Weiser Books/Red Wheel-Weiser, 2021. 265 pages with a bibliography and two appendices. Trade paperback. The devil himself or any unfriendly spirit that is bringing on bad luck or any kind of calamity needs to be conjured away or, as this title, phrases it, needs to be doctored into ceasing and desisting. The author of this book learned traditional magic practices especially from older relatives as he grew up in East Tennessee. He feels these practices and superstitions are a crucial part of Appalachian culture. He...

NON-FICTION BJU and Me: Queer Voices from the World’s Most Christian University edited by Lance Weldy. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2022. 347 pages with a Bibliography and Glossary of BJU terms. Trade paperback. It takes guts to call any university the “world’s most Christian.” There is and has been a lot of competition for that title, but I will admit that BJU (Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina) is a contender. In the 1960s it was one of the campuses that I was kicked off of for trying to organize against the Vietnam War there. The author...