Mountain Hands : A Portrait of Southern Appalachia
, by VENABLE SAM- ISBN: 9781572330900 | 1572330902
- Cover: Paperback
- Copyright: 9/1/2000
All of these people, and many more like them, are Appalachians who work with their hands. Journalist Sam Venable and photographer Paul Efird spent four years combing the hills and hollows of southern Appalachia to find these talented individuals and let them talk about their work. Mountain Hands is an intimate look at more than three dozen such craftspeople and their vocations.
Venable and Efird encountered folks who pursue popular crafts, such as basketweaving and clockmaking. But they found practitioners of other trades -- wallpaper hangers and rail splitters, beekeepers and gravediggers -- whose work also depends upon dexterity and upon expressing a distinctive Appalachian way of life. Some are college educated, some can barely read and write; some have lived in these hills all their lives, others have only recently come to call them hom