Here are 95 books that Wicked Western Kentucky fans have personally recommended if you like
Wicked Western Kentucky.
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As a lifelong Kentuckian with a lifelong fascination for history, true crime, biography, and the supernatural, once I started writing, I pursued these and related topics. The writer Charles Fort’s research methods interested me: he read old newspapers looking for forgotten stories. That seemed a good way to find little-known information. I am a lecturer in the English Department at Eastern Kentucky University and have spent two decades reading old newspapers issue by issue between classes and taking notes on possible stories. The books on my list also include much detail on entertaining obscurities, and I hope you enjoy them.
This book is the frightening tale of Floyd Collins, the Kentucky cave explorer who in 1925 violated one of the cardinal rules of spelunking: don’t go alone.
His leg was pinned by a falling rock, and rescuers’ ultimately tragic efforts to feed and free him became a worldwide sensation. The book resonates with me because the incident well illustrates the best side of humanity (the dangerous rescue attempt) as well as the worst (persons who exploited Collins’s plight for personal gain).
"When Floyd Collins became trapped in a cave in southern Kentucky in early 1925, the sensationalism and hysteria of the rescue attempt generated America's first true media spectacle, making Collins's story one of the seminal events of the century. The crowds that gathered outside Sand Cave turned the rescue site into a carnival. Collins's situation was front-page news throughout the country, hourly bulletins interrupted radio programs, and Congress recessed to hear the latest word. Trapped! is both a tense adventure and a brilliant historical recreation of the past. This new edition includes a new epilogue revealing information about the Floyed…
As a lifelong Kentuckian with a lifelong fascination for history, true crime, biography, and the supernatural, once I started writing, I pursued these and related topics. The writer Charles Fort’s research methods interested me: he read old newspapers looking for forgotten stories. That seemed a good way to find little-known information. I am a lecturer in the English Department at Eastern Kentucky University and have spent two decades reading old newspapers issue by issue between classes and taking notes on possible stories. The books on my list also include much detail on entertaining obscurities, and I hope you enjoy them.
This is a lavishly illustrated collection of old and new oddities from around the state, including cryptids, ghosts, cave mummies, UFOs, roadside attractions, the Melungeons (what’s a Melungeon? Read it and see), and the famous Blue People.
I was attracted by the entertaining writing style, the inclusion of both documented fact and folklore, and biographies of historical characters.
That’s a question Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman have enjoyed asking for years—and their offbeat sense of curiosity led them to create the bestselling phenomenon, Weird N.J. Now the weirdness has spread throughout key locales in the U.S. Each fun and intriguing volume offers more than 250 illustrated pages of places where tourists usually don’t venture—it’s chock-full of oddball curiosities, ghostly places, local legends, crazy characters, cursed roads, and peculiar roadside attractions. What’s NOT shockingly odd here: that every previously published Weird book has become a bestseller in its…
As a lifelong Kentuckian with a lifelong fascination for history, true crime, biography, and the supernatural, once I started writing, I pursued these and related topics. The writer Charles Fort’s research methods interested me: he read old newspapers looking for forgotten stories. That seemed a good way to find little-known information. I am a lecturer in the English Department at Eastern Kentucky University and have spent two decades reading old newspapers issue by issue between classes and taking notes on possible stories. The books on my list also include much detail on entertaining obscurities, and I hope you enjoy them.
Dark Highwayis the best piece ever written on one of the state’s most fascinating murder cases.
In November 1936, Gen. Henry Denhardt, prominent politician and former lieutenant governor, was suspected of shooting his fiancée Verna Garr Taylor (“the prettiest woman in two counties”). DAngelo uses an impressive array of sources to recreate what almost certainly happened.
The case strikes me as especially enigmatic since an elderly woman claimed to be the only surviving person who knew the truth behind the murder but swore she would never reveal it. As I recall, she died just after the book was published in 2016, so if she had information of value it is lost forever.
On a cold November night in 1936, the body of beautiful businesswoman Verna Garr Taylor is found in a ditch along a lonely highway in rural Kentucky. Verna has been shot through the heart, and fiancé, former lieutenant governor and brigadier general Henry Denhardt insists she committed suicide.
But the clues left behind point to murder, and General Denhardt quickly becomes the target of investigators. The general's sensational murder trial draws reporters from all over the country to the small Kentucky community. The case is featured in the New York Times, the London Herald, Newsweek, Time, Life, and other national…
As a lifelong Kentuckian with a lifelong fascination for history, true crime, biography, and the supernatural, once I started writing, I pursued these and related topics. The writer Charles Fort’s research methods interested me: he read old newspapers looking for forgotten stories. That seemed a good way to find little-known information. I am a lecturer in the English Department at Eastern Kentucky University and have spent two decades reading old newspapers issue by issue between classes and taking notes on possible stories. The books on my list also include much detail on entertaining obscurities, and I hope you enjoy them.
Of the many strange stories from Kentucky, this book concentrates on ones from Lexington/Fayette County with a witty writing style that strikes a balance of history and humor.
Young-Brown covers several remarkable duels, frontier violence, racism, and the notorious prostitute Belle Brezing. One of the most remarkable stories concerns Col. William Breckinridge, a congressman who delivered lectures to young women on the importance of chastity yet was involved in a sex scandal that destroyed his career.
Historical true crime is well-represented by the story of golf pro Marion Miley, whose 1941 murder could be the topic for a book of its own.
Filled with tales of infamous duels, cheating congressmen, and much more, Wicked Lexington, Kentucky offers the first collection the city's rowdy and ruckus history .
Despite its illustrious beginnings as the "Athens of the west," Lexington has always had a darker side lurking just beneath its glossy sheen. It didn't take long for the first intellectual hub west of the Alleghenies to quickly morph into a city with the same scandalous inclinations as neighboring Louisville and Cincinnati. From Belle Brezing's infamous brothel of the late 1800s, frequented by some of the city's most prominent businessmen, and once pardoned by the…
I am a historian based in Louisville, Kentucky. When I moved here two decades ago, I could tell the vibe was different than other places I had been. Southern—but not like Tennessee. Midwestern—but not like Illinois. So I started reading, and eventually writing, about the state’s history. I have a Ph.D. in United States history so I lean toward academic books. I like authors who dig into the primary sources of history and then come out and make an argument about the evidence that they uncovered. I also lean toward social and cultural history—rather than military history—of the Civil War.
I have long been interested in the history of US religion but a lot of religious history can be, well, boring. Harlow’s book is not. People interested in the Civil War often forget about the role religious belief played in the lives of 19th-century Americans, preferring to focus on military strategy or the politics of emancipation and Reconstruction. Harlow’s book foregrounds religion and shows how pro-slavery theology united Kentuckians even as they split over the war. And how that same theology helps explain why they turned their back on their wartime Unionism and embraced the Lost Cause version of events.
This book sheds new light on the role of religion in the nineteenth-century slavery debates. Luke E. Harlow argues that the ongoing conflict over the meaning of Christian 'orthodoxy' constrained the political and cultural horizons available for defenders and opponents of American slavery. The central locus of these debates was Kentucky, a border slave state with a long-standing antislavery presence. Although white Kentuckians famously cast themselves as moderates in the period and remained with the Union during the Civil War, their religious values showed no moderation on the slavery question. When the war ultimately brought emancipation, white Kentuckians found themselves…
When students ask me if I am from Kentucky, I say “no, but I got here as quickly as I could.” I chose to make the state my home and raise my family here, and I have studied its history for nearly three decades. I am drawn to Kentucky’s story and the paradox it represents: on one hand, you have the Derby, rolling hills and pastures, and fine bourbon, but set against that polished, sophisticated image are the stereotypes of a lawless, illiterate, poor state. As a borderland, not quite north or south, east or west, Kentucky offers a fascinating lens through which to view the nation’s history.
Ever since John Filson wrote the first history of the state in 1784, the Kentucky frontier has captured the public’s imagination. Aron goes beyond heroic accounts and stories of triumph to understand how egalitarian aims and the sense that the West could become a “good poor man’s country” failed to pan out for so many. The west did not become the land of opportunity for Native Americans or slaves, nor did it provide a fresh start for many poor white men and women. Two iconic figures, Boone and Clay, serve as familiar bookends, neatly framing Aron’s story and tying their worlds to the one we recognize today.
Eighteenth-century Kentucky was a place where Indian and European cultures collided-and, surprisingly, coincided. But this mixed world did not last, and it eventually gave way to nineteenth-century commercial and industrial development. How the West Was Lost tracks the overlapping conquest, colonization, and consolidation of the trans-Appalachian frontier. Not a story of paradise lost, this is a book about possibilities lost. It focuses on the common ground between Indians and backcountry settlers which was not found, the frontier customs that were not perpetuated, the lands that were not distributed equally, the slaves who were not emancipated, the agrarian democracy that was…
I identify as agender and grew up in Oklahoma, one of the worst places to be trans or LGBTQ because of the onslaught of anti-LGBTQ legislation that’s flying through the Oklahoma state legislature. Writing Ugliest, a book about teen activists fighting these laws, reminded me how important standing up for what’s right is and what powerful activists teens can be when they get together. This list has other books celebrating the strength of teens protesting and pushing against societal wrongs. Although some terrible things happen in these books—just like in the real world—reading them reminds us that fighting back is worth it.
I loved this great story about trying to do the right thing when everything is stacked against you. Ecological disasters rarely make the news anymore, but in this book, a teen discovers that a mining operation in her grandma’s town is making people sick. She can’t abide the corruption of local authorities and how everyone is held hostage by the jobs the mining industry brings.
I cheered Liberty along as she fought and fought, gathering help along the way from unlikely corners. She draws on her sense of justice to find a way that works around the corruption and right the wrongs in a real way, and I was reminded that even if you can’t help everyone, helping as many as you can is worth it.
2017 Green Earth Book Award, Young Adult Fiction 2017 Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award (SONWA), Young Adult Notable Book
With her mother facing prison time for a violent political protest, seventeen-year-old Liberty Briscoe has no choice but to leave her Washington, DC, apartment and take a bus to Ebbottsville, Kentucky, to live with her granny. There she can at least finish high school and put some distance between herself and her mother―or her former mother, as she calls her. But Ebbottsville isn't the same as Liberty remembers, and it's not just because the top of Tanner's Peak has been…
I grew up in a house filled with books as a son of educated, well-read parents. My mother was an English/French/Spanish teacher, and my father was an encyclopedia editor. Among all the books in our downstairs, there was a custom-built coffin bookcase my father kept stocked with his favorite horror novels. He died when I was eleven and in an effort to get to know him better, I started reading the books in that coffin. I was very quickly turned into a horror fan, and a few years later started writing horror stories myself. Every time I start writing another horror story, I know I’m my father’s son.
Not a dread-inducing house this time but a lighthouse—in the middle of the woods. This book is so original in its elements—a haunted lighthouse, a sheriff in love with the woman who shot him, and a big-cat sanctuary—that it is completely awe-inspiring how Koryta is able to weave together a complex, creepy ghost narrative. Koryta (and his pseudonym, Scott Carson) is always a guaranteed purchase when a new book publishes.
Discover a brilliant thriller set in a remote big-cat sanctuary: "one of the scariest and most touching horror tales in years" (James Patterson).
In an isolated stretch of eastern Kentucky, on a hilltop known as Blade Ridge, stands a lighthouse that illuminates nothing but the surrounding woods. For years the lighthouse has been considered no more than an eccentric local landmark -- until its builder is found dead at the top of the light, and his belongings reveal a troubling local history.
For deputy sheriff Kevin Kimble, the lighthouse-keeper's death is disturbing and personal. Years ago, Kimble was shot while…
I have been a journalist for over a decade, most frequently writing on the subjects of spirits, cocktails, and drinking culture for such publications as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Esquire, Playboy, and VinePair. I have written 12 books—6 of them on booze—my latest of which is Dusty Booze: In Search of Vintage Spirits.
Booze books need not only to be filed all the way in the back of the bookstore in the “Food/Drink” section; the best deserve to be mainstream—and bestseller Pappyland proved that.
This is a dual memoir in some ways, following the rise, fall, and incredible rise again of the Van Winkle family and their grandfather Pappy’s vaunted and eponymous spirit, along with the story of Thompson reckoning with his own family lore and fatherhood.
“A warm and loving reflection that, like good bourbon, will stand the test of time.” —Eric Asimov, The New York Times
The story of how Julian Van Winkle III, the caretaker of the most coveted cult Kentucky Bourbon whiskey in the world, fought to protect his family's heritage and preserve the taste of his forebears, in a world where authenticity, like his product, is in very short supply.
Following his father’s death decades ago, Julian Van Winkle stepped in to try to save the bourbon business his grandfather had founded on the mission statement: “We…
I’m fascinated by singular women who have found ways to express themselves and to flourish in the face of doubt. My experience of moving country as a child, family breakdown, losing a parent as a teenager, and dropping out has left me intrigued by other women with the drive to survive on their own terms. Of course, the social constraints a woman must overcome will vary according to when she lived, but common characteristics will be bravery and obstinacy. I’ve now written three novels about women who have succeeded against the odds. I hope the books I’ve recommended captivate you as much as they do me.
American settler Cy Bellman leaves his daughter Bess to search for giant monsters in a Kentucky swamp.
It’s a brilliant story of a man’s obsession. But it’s Bess who fascinates. While others doubt Bellman’s sanity, Bess believes in him. Young and vulnerable, when danger strikes, she’s as fierce as the wilderness her father faces.
She’s left to grow up in the care of an indifferent aunt. When Bess is touched inappropriately by the librarian, the girl takes evasive action. When the yard hand almost rapes her, she fights back, then with a snap, regains her composure to deal with a shocking death.
Davies uses words economically and poetically: they leave me breathless. Though short, the book’s an epic.
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Sunday Times (UK) * The Guardian (UK) * The Washington Independent Review of Books * Sydney Morning Herald * The Los Angeles Public Library * The Irish Independent * Real Simple *
Finalist for the Rathbones Folio Prize
“Carys Davies is a deft, audacious visionary.” —Téa Obreht
When widowed mule breeder Cy Bellman reads in the newspaper that colossal ancient bones have been discovered in the salty Kentucky mud, he sets out from his small Pennsylvania farm to see for himself if the rumors are true: that the giant monsters are…
