By Jeremy B. Jones
Published: Blair, 2014.
263 pp. Hardcover in original dust jacket. Text is complete, clean and unmarked. Not Ex-Lib.
Across the Blue Ridge Mountains stretches a world both charming and complicated.
Jeremy Jones and his wife move into a small house above the creek where his family had settled 200 years prior. He takes a job alongside his former teachers in the local elementary school and sets out on a search to understand how this ancient land has shaped its people-how it shaped him. His search sends him burrowing in the past-hunting buried treasure and POW camps, unearthing Civil War graves and family feuds, exploring gated communities and tourist traps, encountering changed accents and immigrant populations, tracing Wal-Mart's sidewalks and carved-out mountains-and pondering the future. He meshes narrative and myth, geology and genealogy, fiddle tunes and local color about the briskly changing and oft-stigmatized world of his native southern Appalachians.
Somehow, these journeys continually lead him back to the mystical Bearwallow Mountain, a peak suddenly in flux.
I've done my best to describe the book, but if you have additional questions, please don't hesitate to send me an e-mail.