Night Comes To The Cumberlands: A Biography Of A Depressed Area. By Harry M. Caudill.
WS Deal
$3.98 --(book-$0.99 + audio narration-$2.99).
4.5 (176), for the book, at Amazon. 364 pages.
(Please read a couple of notes at the end of this post).
Description
At the start of the 1960s the USA was unquestionably the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world.
Yet despite its prosperity and influence there were areas of the country which seemed to have been forgotten.
In 1962 Harry Caudill, a lawyer and legislator, decided to shine a light upon the appalling conditions which he witnessed in Eastern Kentucky.
His introduction lays out the issues which he saw before him: A million Americans in the Southern Appalachians live in conditions of squalor, ignorance and ill health which could scarcely be equaled in Europe or Japan or, perhaps, in parts of mainland Asia.
Caudill begins with the history of region, from its first settlements through to the Civil War, the feuds that erupted between violent neighbors, the emerging lumber trade and the advent of the coal industry, before uncovering the devastation of the depression, the effects of massive environmental damage and the ever continuing decline into poverty and despair for many of the inhabitants.
Get the whole deal by navigating to
the ebook's webpage at Amazon.
Note:
1) A different edition of this book is also available at Amazon. The Kindle is $5.00; there is no audio mentioned, therefore there would be no WS deal for it.
2) The title of the book paints with "too wide of a brush"--I am very familiar with large swaths of "the Cumberlands" (the Cumberland Mountain range with its Plateaus, which abuts on the west the much better known Appalachians). Not all of the Cumberlands were impoverished. The end of the description (above) delimits the area of the "Cumberlands" that the author almost certainly (I haven't read the book) is talking about--it is the Cumberlands of
Eastern Kentucky.