Kentucky by Heart: Some personal reading recommendations to get you through the fall season

By Steve Flairty
NKyTribune columnist

My personal reading choices have little to do with the time of the year it happens to be. In fact, I just finished Louisville novelist Bill Noel’s new book, a Christmas story called Silent Night (Hydra Publications).

Good reading is good reading, any time. My literary material decisions usually answer this question in the affirmative: Is the book about Kentucky or written by a Kentucky author?

But for those who might rightly be called “reading chameleons,” who take a seasonal approach to what they choose, here are some possibilities, including the reviews I wrote about some of them in Kentucky Monthly in recent years. I though these might be good offerings for autumn, or, talking more Kentucky-ish, “fall.”

Kentucky, Naturally: The Kentucky Heritage Land Conservation Fund at Work.
Author: Thomas G. Barnes
Publisher: Acclaim Press (2013)
Price: $39.95 hardcover

In 1994, The Kentucky Heritage Land Conservation Fund was established to protect rural environments from precipitous land conversion. The act has seen positive results, with some 85,000 acres bought and put under the organization’s watchful umbrella as of 2010.

Dr. Thomas Barnes, respected University of Kentucky forester and state extension wildlife specialist, was tasked to shoot and display “hundreds of beautiful photographs of the state’s protected lands”…and to provide “detailed descriptions of each site, including the natural flora and fauna.”

The result is Kentucky Naturally: The Kentucky Heritage Land Conservation Fund at Work, a 144-page coffee table book treasure that, along with the beautiful photographs, leaves Kentuckians with a wealth of valuable insight and inspiration to both appreciate and encourage wise stewardship of the state’s biodiversity.

Samples of the author’s work in the project include featuring places like Bad Branch State Nature Preserve, in Letcher County, whose attributes include “a 60-foot-tall waterfall”…and which has “one of the largest concentrations of rare plants and animals in Kentucky.” Or, Raven Run, in Fayette County, where HLCF funds added almost twice its acreage, and where the “landfill was cleaned up and reforested in 2012.”

Sadly, Dr. Barnes died recently, but left the Commonwealth with some sage words. He cautioned that “(when) species, habitats, and ecosystems are lost, degraded, or altered, we need to purchase an insurance policy to protect us from an uncertain future.”

His presence will be sorely missed.

The Embattled Wilderness: The Natural and Human History of Robinson Forest
Author(s): Erik Reece and James J. Krupa
Publisher: The University of Georgia Press (2013)
Price: $24.95 (cloth)

Robinson Forest, in eastern Kentucky, has been an important natural laboratory of study for the University of Kentucky, and for a long time. The fourteen thousand acre parcel was gifted to the school in 1923 after being clear-cut for timber. It has been called “one of our most important natural landscapes—and one of the most threatened.”

In The Embattled Wilderness: The Natural and Human History of Robinson Forest, UK faculty members Erik Reece and James Krupa write in rotating chapters about the cultural and natural history of the woodland acreage. With smooth prose, Reece deftly shares the “humanities” side of the equation: what Robinson Forest has meant to the region and what its diminishment would mean.

He, perhaps, is most effective while sharing a vignette about a non-believer student on a class field trip there who acknowledges a new appreciation for the Robinson natural uniqueness. Krupa, from a strong biological orientation, gives a fascinating analysis of the complex interaction between the plant and animal life (read woodrats, etc.), and also demonstrates his students’ serious engagement in the exploration.

In the continuing societal discourse on the environment, Reece and Krupa make a passionate and compelling argument for preservation, portraying Robinson Forest as a worthy microcosm to observe.

True Ghost Stories and Eerie Legends from America’s Most Haunted Neighborhood
Author: David Domine
Publisher: CreateSpace (2014)
Price: $14.01 paperback

When David Domine bought a house to make his home in Old Louisville’s noted Millionaire’s Row in 1999, he was not one to seriously embrace the reports he’d heard about the area being haunted. Though skeptical by nature, he changed his tune when he heard unexplained footsteps and exotic smells intruding on his senses in his new surroundings.

Sharing the unexplained occurrences with his neighbors, he found that he was in no way alone in his discoveries.

From that, food writer Domine became a “ghost author,” and he painstakingly researched the same by interviewing numerous individuals, inspecting old homes around him, and spending time in the public library reading old newspaper accounts of apparitions and weird activities in the area. The result was the popular Ghosts of Old Louisville series, and from those stories spawned an edited and updated collection called True Ghost Stories and Eerie Legends from America’s Most Haunted Neighborhood, a 299-page tome with plenty of photographs.

Domine, an outstanding writer, consistently weaves a thread of authenticity through all the haunted narratives, connecting seamlessly quotes of interviewees with his own picturesque language. The result is the reader’s sense of an objective reporter but with the flow of a smoothly entertaining series of short stories.

Campfire Tales: Kentucky
Author: Roberta Simpson Brown
Publisher: Schiffer Publishing, Ltd. (2013)
Price: $14.99 softcover

“Times may have changed, but scary stories have endured,” says author and professional storyteller Roberta Simpson Brown. Here in Kentucky, with a history of oral tradition that, for years, kept the pre-television generations both entertained and informed, stories of the paranormal are still popular.