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CHILDREN’S BOOKS The Ghostly Tales of Chattanooga by Amy Petulla and Jessica Penot. Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Children’s Books, 2021. 107 pages, illustrated with black-and-white drawings and a map. A 5.25” X 7.75” trade paperback. This book is adapted for 8 to 12-year-olds from the 2011 trade book, Haunted Chattanooga, by the same co-authors. These ghost stories are set in hospitals, schools, mountains, valleys, hotels, caves, jails, cemeteries, rivers, dams, monuments and even museums. Plus, one is set at the Chattanooga Choo Choo! All are short and sweet, and the print-size is ample. Jessica Penot is a therapist and writer...

NON-FICTION Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland by Jeremy B. Jones. Durham, North Carolina: Blair, a 2021 paperback edition of a 2014 hardback release. 251 pages. Trade paperback. This book won the Gold Award in memoir from the Independent Publishers. Bearwallow is the name of the mountain that rises above the small Henderson County, North Carolina, community of Edneyville.  Jeremy B. Jones was raised there and returned, newly married, to teach at the elementary school he had attended as a child. "'Me in place and the place in me,' Seamus Heaney declares in his poem 'A Herbal.' That...

NON-FICTION The Ashe County Frescoes of Benjamin F. Long, IV by Janet C. Pittard and David B Chiswell. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2021. 98 pages with an Index, Chapter Notes, color and black and white illustrations, and Bibliography. 7” X 10” trade paperback. Ben Long was born in 1945, grew up in Statesville, North Carolina, graduated from theUniversity of North Carolina, and then studied art in New York City under accomplished artists. After serving two tours as a marine in Vietnam, he apprenticed himself for eight years under Pietro Annigoni, a renowned Italian artist. In the late 1970s...

NON-FICTION Education in Black and White: Myles Horton and the Highlander Center’s Vision of Social Justice by Stephen Preskill. Oakland, University of California Press, 2021. 369 pages with an Index, Works Cited, Notes, and photographs. Hardback in dust jacket. This is one of the most important books of this decade. I remember the Tennessee billboards that proclaimed, “Martin Luther King at Communist Training School” with a picture showing King at Highlander’s 25th Anniversary celebration in 1957. Neither were Communists, of course, but those who opposed Kind and Highlander could not attack them with truths. Highlander was founded by Myles Horton...

FICTION The Collected Breece D’J Pancake: Stories, Fragments, Letters edited by Jayne Anne Phillips. New York: Library of America/Penguin Random House, 2020. 384 pages with an Index and Notes. Hardback in dust jacket. The first sentence in this book appears at the start of Jayne Anne Phillips’ Introduction. It reads, “Breece D’J Pancake’s dozen stories, completed in the last four or five years of his life, include some of the best short stories written anywhere, at any time.” She means anywhere in the world, and anytime in the history of the written world. And this is Jayne Anne Phillips, herself...