conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know a description for a book titled River Of Earth about River, Earth, Earth</I with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: "A tenderly written and well-sustained story."<I>New York Times</I><P>"His characters are endowed with vigor and stature. Its achievement as an artisic creation of a people and a locale is as sound as its pretensions are modest."<I>Saturday Review of Books</I><P>"the author tells of [his people's] japes and sorrows and near starvation, the rich archaic poetry of their talk and customs in a clear, dry style as unsentimental as his seven-year-old's eyes. He has produced a work of art."<I>Time Magazine</I><P>"As you read you can hear the redbirds in the plum thickets and smell the pawpaws at first frost; you know, too, what it means to scrape the bottom of the meat box with a plow blade, hunting for a rind of pork amid the salt when the mines are closed."<I>Washington Post</I><P>"Mr. the author's local language is true and good."<I>Lincoln Herald Times</I><P>"There is hunger and suffering and death in this child's experience but there is also laughter, riddles and tales told from the past, and the surrounding natural landscape moving from one season to the next. The reappearance of River of Earth is a welcome literary event."<I>Wilma Dykeman, South Atlantic Bulletin</I><P>"Among best novels, we may distinguish between "greats" and smaller masterpieces... Small masterpieces are not so deep nor so grand in scope. Yet their art may be just as exquisite, for these books render a limited human action just right. You finish them thinking you would neither change a word nor omit a scene. Willa Cather's <I>Death Comes for the Archbishop</I> is such a book; so is Hemingway's <I>The Old Man and the Sea</I>. Another work of fiction that surely ranks among America's small masterpieces is as Kentuckian as a book can be. This is the author's River of Earth... From first to last, the author's scenic art is nearabout perfect. It yields a carefully observed canvas of life of a particular place and time. Advocate-Messenger"James L. Nicholson, <I>Advocate-Messenger</I><P>"<I>River of Earth</I> is fiction. But it is far too honest, too human, too real and believable, to be considered a manufactured saga of a historically stricken region deep within our American landscape. <P><P>[...] [It] is an extremely important slice of Appalachia, a culture that has far too often been ignored or left behind by the full-speed-ahead achievements of this country over the past 100 years. Which is precisely why <I>River of Earth</I> needs to be rediscovered. Relevant as ever, it remains worthy of our attention and praise and reflection. It is genuine Americana told in a brilliant, clear, lyrical style. I want to make sure people know about it."<I>Midwest Book Review</I>
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first four paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: River of Earth
  And when the mines close and the crops fail there is little complaining. They simply pack up and move again, accepting, hoping, laughing to make their misfortune bearable.
  More than twenty years before the region was labeled a "poverty pocket" and prior to the surprised reactions of experts and government officials to the problems of destitution, as though they had encountered some recent wonder, James Still had presented the heartbreaking account of what it means for a human being to live out his life hungry and cold. His is not a socioeconomist's collection of figures, causes, and possible cures, but the dramatized plight of human beings accepting poverty without accusations or judgments or rantings against outside institutions.
  Still is a writer of constricted lives, valid desperations, and victories that seem small reward for all the patience and hurt they exact; but in his most successful scenes he creates a world whose resonances echo beyond the last word to the fullness of the reader's capacity to understand. His work reflects a compassion, insight, and objectivity remindful of Katherine Anne Porter ("The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," "The Downward Path to Wisdom") and of Bernard Malamud ("The Loan," "The Magic Barrel").
  An emotional response is the one quality above all for which Still works. There are no games, no literary or historical allusions, no puns, no symbolism, sentimentality, didacticism, or redundancy. He gives no motives, airs no theories, states no beliefs. He simply sets down the experiences of a few human beings during a season of change in a certain place. And he does it in a manner that is simple and unposed and with the perception and restraint that denote an imagination as honest, as controlled, as the needle of a compass. And the emotion is present as certainly as the leaf is in the bud. In giving order to "a handful of chaos" Still has created a new and fresh view of a range of mountains seventy million years old and of a people that promise to survive all industrial upheavals.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know another paragraph?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Grandma stirred old garments with her hands. A mellow smell came out of the trunk. It swept the room. She lifted a white cotton shirt, crackling with starch. The collar was stiff as a harness.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last five paragraphs? End with the sentence ' A baby was crying in the far room.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Father scoffed. "Hit's printed a feller can catch bull frogs and net butterflies for a living. All foolishness."
  Someone in the kitchen closed the door between the two rooms. Feet passed quick and small over the floors. Father went to the door and stood for a while, his hand on the knob. But he did not go in. He came back to his chair, worried and restless, crossing and uncrossing his legs. "Alpha's so puny we can't go to the burying," he told Uncle Jolly. "Tell Luce and Toll we wanted to come."
  The sleepless hours weighed upon my eyes. I dozed. On awaking, the blackness of the window was tempered with gray. Higher, along the ridgetops, light was growing. It was colder. My legs were bound with stiffness and my breath fogged. Father had tilted his chair, making talk, questioning. "What if this Sawyers girl says no?" he asked Uncle Jolly. A woolly mist curled out of his mouth.
  Uncle Jolly stumbled to the porch, smothering his joy. He clumped into the yard. Father stood again at the kitchen door, grasping the knob, waiting; then he went inside. I heard feet walking, walking. The kitchen fire was being shaken and replenished; the yeasty smell of morning bread hung on a windy draft. I closed my eyes, being near to sleep. I looked at Grandma in the dark of my head where I could see her living face. "Grandma," I spoke, "where have you gone?"
  I waked, trembling with cold, and it was morning. The coffin box had been taken away. The chairs sat empty upon the hearth. I ran outside, and there were only wagon tracks to mark where death had come into our house and gone again. They were shriveled and dim under melting frost. I turned suddenly toward the house, listening. A baby was crying in the far room.