Book Fair: Swift on Caudill

My old newspaper crony Ivan ( Red) Swift, reminding me again of one of the most eye-opening books I ever read, offers an entry at the Underbelly summer Book Fair:

Compulsive book buyers with loaded shelves know what it's like to look for a book, pull another one off the shelf for a scan, and end up not finding the original search volume. I was looking for Night Comes To the Cumberlands, by Harry Caudill, for a couple of grafs review for Underbelly. The reason i was looking for that particular book was because in the early '60s, when i was political reporter on The Louisville (Kentucky) Times, I wrote a review of it that may be the longest book review ever published in a daily newspaper. It covered, with photos, more than an entire page. newspaper pages were bigger then.

Underbelly was also a reporter on that paper then, and, who knows, he may have remembered the review when he asked me to write this. (Another reporter on the staff then was William Greider, who was notorious for writing long -- really long -- articles. But I'd bet nothing he wrote for the paper exceeded the length of my review of the Harry Caudill book).

To get back to the beginning, the book I pulled off a shelf was The Southern Appalachians by Charlton Ogburn. It's a great book if you like to read about nature and topography and people. (I know a lot about Appalachia. I live at the Alabama end).

But, glancing through it, I saw it mentions Night Comes to the Cumberlands. Ogburn uses the words "almost unbearable poignancy" to describe some of the writing by Caudill, who I knew well. A lot of the book fits that description.

But, the last chapter doesn't. the last chapter covered solutions to Eastern Kentucky's problems. The solutions weren't going to happen, and they read like Harry knew they weren't going to happen. Strip mined mountains, bad roads, poor schools, sicker people -- not much has changed.

Comment: I remember the review, and I certainly remember the book: Caudill created a stir among serious readers in its time, although it is hard to identify anything it did to improve life in the Appalachians. The book was first published in 1962; it was republished in 2001, and is available at online retailers. There’s a Google excerpt available here, and an interesting negative review here. Underbelly Book Fair posts here.