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Original Title:	Oral History
ISBN:	0345410289 (ISBN13: 9780345410283)
Edition Language:	English

Oral History

Lee Smith

Paperback | Pages: 286 pages

Rating: 4.07 | 3639 Users | 191 Reviews

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Title	:	Oral History
Author	:	Lee Smith
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Deluxe Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 286 pages
Published	:	August 27th 1996 by Ballantine Books (first published June 15th 1983)
Categories	:	Fiction. American. Southern. Historical. Historical Fiction

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This is a story about five generations of the Cantrell family. They live in Hoot Owl Holler in West Virginia. Southern life in the mountains of Appalachia is the book's story. The first Cantrell came from Ireland. The patriarch fought in the Civil War for the Union, lost a leg and when the remaining stump putrefied he died, leaving to his wife and three sons lots of land in the holler and up the sides of the three surrounding mountains. We follow these sons, their wives and offspring through the 20th century. The author knows Southern life intimately. Her writing captures well the dialect, the songs that are sung, the landscape with its mists, sparkling creeks birds and flora, the farming, the logging and the mining of coal. The traditions and beliefs of the inhabitants -- mystical, supernatural and religious. How babies are ‘caught’ by midwives, which herbs heal and those which poison. Corn can be sold in the market, but distilling it into liquor is more profitable. With so many hungry children to feed, that distilling is chosen is self-evident. All of the above is drawn in this story. We see the Prohibition, the Depression and the coming of roads, electricity and mining. More importantly we see the effects on the region’s people. This is the backdrop for the family drama of witches and hauntings, birth and death, feuds, passion and love affairs. What is drawn is based on knowledge of these people’s traditions and beliefs. The telling is drawn with taste. The sex is sensuous, not vulgar. I am not religious and I am skeptical of the supernatural, but this book shows why these people are religious and do believe in the supernatural. You see their world through their eyes. Only in this way can one properly learn about others’ lifestyles. Many small details fill this story, such as a particular pair of earrings, an apron or a chair. You see them once and then twenty-five years later. They pass down from one generation to another; they are no longer just any old thing. The objects take on meaning; each bears a particular significance. These details weave a story of lives over time. I was terribly impressed by the author’s ability to so cleverly intertwine the personal stories of five generations of a family. Without a hitch, all the details fit. The story progresses from one narrator to another as the years pass. This feels very natural as the focus shifts from one generation to the next. The book starts with Jennifer, a college student of our times who has taken a tape recorder home to talk to her relatives and catch the spirits of a haunted house for a school project. Then the story flips back in time and continues up to the present, where we first began. I was on the verge of giving the book five stars, but the end goes on too long. It loses its impact. I wish it had been shortened or tied up in another way. Jennifer and her mother’s life story are told too quickly, by a family member who does not really seem to care. How the concluding part of the story is told does fit she who is telling the story at this point and it does have amusing parts, but it still lost my interest. This is why I have given the book four rather than five stars. The audiobook has a full cast narration. The narrators are Christine McMurdo-Wallis, Sally Darling, Ruth Ann Phinister, Jeff Woodman, Tom Stechschulte and C. J. Critt. The persons telling the different portions of the story are well matched to the six narrators of the audiobook. The production of the audiobook is done with a flair—songs are sung, the narrators change not according to chapter divisions, but instead when most appropriate, usually when the person speaking changes. I have given the narration four stars. While I did prefer some of the narrators more than others, they all fit their respective character roles well. It was an advantage that a full cast performance was used. Do I recommend the book? Definitely. I also recommend listening to it with the full cast narration. *************** Oral History 4 stars Fair and Tender Ladies 4 stars Dimestore: A Writer's Life 2 stars

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Ratings: 4.07 From 3639 Users | 191 Reviews

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Originally read more than 20 years ago as a BYU student and I can tell its staying power because it's one of the rare, rare, rare books I've actually held on to (ask my book club friends: I'm so cheap, I NEVER buy the book of the month). I stumbled on it in my basement last week, plopped right down and read it start to finish. Wacky, upsetting, and a totally different America than one I could ever imagine, something in this book woke up the latent family historian in me. Don't worry, I'm sure

I wanted to love this book so much. I still want to love it but I found it a bit tedious and underwhelming. I love Appalachia and I loved the first Almarine, the story of his witch, and Pricey Jane. I loved Dory and Richard. And then I felt like things got more and more fragmented as I didn't develop relationships with the other characters and found it harder to stay engaged.

Brilliantly done story that follows the genealogy of one Appalachian family so evocatively, using different voices and narrators from each period of time, taking the child of one story into the adult of the next.

Enjoyable to read, but an unsatisfying conclusion. The structure of the novel was good, with an opening and closing chapter set in the present, and the intervening chapters telling the story. But the author seemed not to know what to do in the last chapter. The story is basically a classical tragedy, with choices made early on reverberating through the decades with bad consequences over and over. I enjoyed the settings of rural Appalachia through the decades of the 20th century. And the story

I got the sense that I was watching a television series, only every time Lee switches characters, it's like missing a few episodes. You still know what is going on, but it's like you missed something. It was very easy to "get into" this book, I read it in two days, but it was still not one of my favorites. There are a lot of explicit sexual encounters that for me, drew away from, rather than supported the believability of the novel. Jennifer is a high school student who is gathering the oral

While Lee Smith has become a favorite writer, I have to say this book was not. Told in various voices over a hundred or so year span of life in Western Virginia, each time the narrator changed it felt like a disruption...a jarring of the story that took a momentary readjustment on my part which was quite off-putting.Too, the beginning and ending of the novel seemed fragmentary...pieces and bits tacked on to introduce Jennifer yet never quite managing to leave the reader with an understanding of

This is a story about five generations of the Cantrell family. They live in Hoot Owl Holler in West Virginia. Southern life in the mountains of Appalachia is the book's story. The first Cantrell came from Ireland. The patriarch fought in the Civil War for the Union, lost a leg and when the remaining stump putrefied he died, leaving to his wife and three sons lots of land in the holler and up the sides of the three surrounding mountains. We follow these sons, their wives and offspring through the