The best books on loss and hope in the southern Appalachian environment

It is an erotic romance of many species. This lush, exuberant novel interweaves the stories of three strong twentieth-century women whose lives are shaped both by their lusts and by the sights, sounds, tastes, scents, and textures of the southern Appalachian landscape. The women’s lives mingle in turn with the lives of others similarly influenced by their lusts and by different sensations of that landscape—among them moths, mice, birds, and immigrant coyotes. The shifts of perspective among Kingsolver’s vividly and voluptuously imagined human and nonhuman protagonists are both disorienting and fascinating. Of this work Kingsolver later writes, “Reader, hear my confession: I have written an unchaste novel.”

Camuto’s supple prose draws the reader into a journey toward mountains that no longer exist, although they are named on some old maps: the southern Appalachians not as they are, but as they were before the European invasion. A keen historian and observant naturalist, Camuto walks deep into “what’s left of the backcountry,” documenting the hopeful reintroduction of the nearly extinct red wolf and reflecting on Cherokee place names, culture, and history. "Needless to say,” he confesses, “I never got to the Cherokee Mountains”—and, in sad irony, shortly after the book’s publication the red wolf reintroduction failed. Still, Camuto has succeeded in recording resonant reminiscences of places, peoples, and biotic populations now lost.

Poet, novelist, and culture critic Wendell Berry decries the sinister tendency of American “progress” to displace, impoverish, or destroy established communities and their lands. Early victims were Native Americans; among the most recent have been small farmers. This is a book of, but not specifically about, southern Appalachia; Berry’s subject is America at large, but he lives at, works on, and derives inspiration from a hill farm in northeastern Kentucky. His thinking, sprung from these roots, is deeply and genuinely conservative. Unlike those corporate anarchists or spiteful malcontents who claim that label today, he actually advocates conservation. Every discerning reader will dissent from some of his opinions, but those whose minds are open will savor his wry and unconventional wisdom.

This emotion-rich novel chronicles three generations of a southern Appalachian family as they rise by ambition and hard work from indebted and nearly destitute farmers to wealthy owners of a national canning business. (In real life, Dykeman married into such a family.) As members of this fictional family feud with one another over the values of “tenderness and toughness,” communal trust and “money-greed,” and “the wild and the useful,” the reader gains insight into the prejudices and passions that have shaped the contemporary land and culture of southern Appalachia. Dykeman was the Tennessee State Historian from 1981 to 2002.

It rings with awe-struck musings on Bartram’s explorations, begun just before the American revolution, of the lush and bountiful landscapes of the southern British colonies. Bartram’s effusive descriptions of the astonishingly profuse flora and fauna, replete with taxonomic names, provide a baseline for gauging the steep ecological declines that followed. The Penguin edition includes an appreciative introduction by American writer James Dickey, best known for his novel Deliverance.