NEW BOOK RELEASES
“Standing in the middle of the weedy dirt lot, Max and Billy Arnold waved as the school bus roared away, leaving a plume of orange dust in its wake. In the waning late afternoon sunlight, in the sleepy silence of that dull October day, the boys stood for a moment looking at Wexler’s shabby little store. The place looked deserted. The filling station’s two old gas pumps, which rose out of the bare ground like a couple of half-toppled tombstones, no longer served any useful purpose since Wexler’s didn’t sell gas anymore. In fact, ever since the new Esso station was built over on the main highway, not to mention the brand new A&P store just ten miles north of town, there wasn’t much Wexler’s did sell besides fishing tackle and hunting licenses.”
Set in the Potomac Highlands of West Virginia, a region of the Mountain State formerly known for its apple production Prince of the Apple Towns follows protagonist Max Arnold as he faces the personal challenge of growing up with a demanding father hell-bent on keeping the family farm going against all odds.
Faced with the slow but insidious forces of economic and social change in the 1950s and 60s, Max Arnold’s story is one shared by many who grew up in the rural countryside, but who were forced to leave for various reasons. It is also a tale of triumph that will surely resonate with those who continue to hold their sense of place close to their hearts.
In Prince of the Apple Towns, author Gary Winkler evokes the rural activism of an
Edward Abbey and the youthful irreverence of a Holden Caulfield, while covering new ground
in a style and voice that is unmistakably his own.
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In historical writing, where
street-level views of average folk are rare, author Gary Winkler's
new book
Common Men, Common Good: A West Virginia
Family's Extraordinary Story provides historians
and the casual
reader with an intimate look at the working life of a rural
craft family as their business evolved
through the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Making extensive use of the public
record, as well as
diaries, letters, account books and photographs,
author Gary Winkler traces the footsteps of these ordinary
men and women who possessed an extraordinary sense of purpose, a
purpose that not only manifested itself
in an astonishing variety of
products, but also in the application of new technologies that in
the end catapulted
their community into the Modern Era.
“Gary Winkler is a
tenacious and careful scholar who has uncovered an important story
about the evolution of the rural craftsman adapting to the effects of industrialization.
As
a trained and practicing craftsman himself, Gary brings special insights to his
research
and is uniquely qualified to understand the problems and processes of
his subject.”
Dr. Oscar P. Fitzgerald, author of Three Centuries of American Furniture (Prentice-Hall)