--(A) Review for www.barnesandnoble.com

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REVIEWER:Patrick Killough (patrick@thekilloughs.com), retired to Western North Carolina, July 8, 2004.

RATING (Stars on a scale of 1 to 5) ****


REVIEW'S TITLE: 40 years of a novelist's work in journalism


North Carolina writer Lewis W. Green writes distinguished novels of mountain life and is an accurate, careful reporter as well as political observer, undercover government investigator, satirist and dispenser of personal invective. His most recent book, OF HUMAN INTEREST shows the author doing doughty battle in all six arenas.

OF HUMAN INTEREST in 248 pages presents 57 narrative pieces, including near the end a few book reviews of Mr Green's novels by others. Many are selections from the author's 40 years of reporting for various periodicals (some his own) in Buncombe County (county seat Asheville) in the lush green mountains of Western North Carolina.

Most selections are from the earlier years, 1961- 1980. In these appears Green the classic journalist, acknowledged by friends and critics alike, as an honest, painstaking narrator of the facts.

Included here are the story of Clyde Leeson who sold to greedy con men very old deeds to most of the Great Smoky National Park; various black men and politicians who told Lewis Green that he wasn't much but was all they had to speak for them; Grand Duke Zeno Ponder of the Kingdom of Madison (County); mountain Nazis; and how Lewis Green helped raised money to help 79 year old George Holmes buy a new mule. Humor abounds. Invective is scarce to non-existent. This period also produced interviews with and insights into Carl Sandburg, Martin Luther King, Jr. and youthful heiress Mamie Reynolds. There are rich nuggets to be mined by biographers and historians.

In more recent years the author's style changed and grew darker and more heavy handed. Factual reporting retained its understated humor but also became mixed with editorializing, commentary and weakly justified personal attacks on and name calling of politicians, churchmen and other writers.

It is to Mr Green's inclusion at the end of his book of an essay by Gary Carden, an author living not far away in Sylva, NC that the book's single most shocking fact is reported. That is the creation in Asheville in the 1930s of the pro-Hitler, anti- semitic Silver Shirts by William Dudley Pelley (p. 242).

The vignettes presented in OF HUMAN INTEREST are about a narrow slice of the admittedly highly fragmented social strata of Mountain North Carolina. You read much of lawyers, sheriffs, police chiefs and law enforcement officers unknown elsewhere, but very little of doctors, craftsmen, painters or school teachers. Of religion there is material on Episcopalians, snake handlers, a word or two about the area's most famous resident Billy Graham, but not much on other Southern Baptists, Roman Catholics or Unitarians. A Jewish rabbi is, however, included among Mr Green's four mentors. Lewis Green, like so many in and around Asheville, moves in a few circles and ignores most others. OF HUMAN INTEREST is a rollicking good read for its accuracy, humor and flashes of compassion for the down and out and the forgotten. -OOO-

Also recommended: Sinclair Lewis, ELMER GANTRY. Lewis Green, AND SCATTER THE PROUD. Yvonne Lehman, MOUNTAIN MAN.

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--(B) Review for www.amazon.com

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RATING (Stars on a scale of 1 to 5) ****


REVIEW'S TITLE:    A Mountain Moralist Attacks The Theater of the Absurd


Reviewer: Patrick Killough from Black Mountain, NC United States


Lewis W. Green's novels of the Mountain Carolinas are becoming cult classics. Less well known are his writings over 40 years as reporter, satirist, hurler of invectives and his related work as college teacher and undercover investigator. His latest book, OF HUMAN INTEREST, looks at Mr Green through 57 segments -- panes within one master prism.

Green knows and defends old Appalachian mountain values. In his novels and in his reporting there is an underlying layer peopled with mountain people who are pugnaciously independent, utterly unwilling to be told what to do. Every friendship, therefore, is like a marriage, voluntarily entered into, a conscious contract involving intense two way loyalties. If one party neglects even one thread of the loyalty bond, his partner's just reaction is revenge. And the revenge of the inarticulate can range from contemptuous name calling to murder in ice cold blood. But, conversely, the gratitude for a patronage job when desperately needed lasts forever (p. 15).

Add to this old Celtic racial underpinning an influx of flatlanders and you have Asheville, the Theater of the Absurd. According to "Colonel Paul Rockwell of the French Foreign Legion" (pp. 122 - 125) the original rulers (not leaders) in the mountains, whether old-timers or recent immigrants, were men out to create a harmonious, cohesive community, men of high standards, with values money could not buy. They regularly put The People ahead of Business. Mountain men, including Green himself, react to flatlander obtuseness with sarcasm and humor (p. 41). People around Green sensed his Old Roman uprightness. Leakers of insider information to the author included an F.BI. agent and a Federal Appeals Judge (p. 8). Others who sought Green's help against unjust entrenched power included an Asheville lawyer (p.13) and friends of an old black man. Nor was it only blacks who were Muslims who told Lewis Green, "You ain't much, man, but you all we got" (p. 74).

Mountain men see visions and ghosts, too. And when they die, there are ceremonies and the best ones are the stately Masonic burial rites (remember that many a Mountain Cherokee had been a Mason). "Doppelgangers, Wraiths, Spirits, etc." (pp. 125 - 130) documents spiritual happenings from Lewis Green's own growing up. And this underpins mountain folks' unique relation to the land, to their time and that of their ancestors and to their proud but sometimes superstitious reaching out to a stern Old Testament God. In "A Backwoods Snake Cult" (pp. 163-164) someone had given Rev. Liston Pack in Cocke County, Tennessee an odd kind of water moccasin to use in church services. One look told Green that it was a six-foot long Queen Cobra. His advice: "Reverend, don't get so anointed you pick that one up. That's not your everyday fundamentalist Cocke County Christian rattlesnake. That's a sophisticated Hindu royal temple snake. She won't understand what you're doing. "

In his earlier writings (1961 - 1980) Lewis Green shows sympathy for and patience with lovable rogues, especially if their roots are in the mountains. Thereafter Asheville and environs slide toward Sodom and Gomorrah. And Green's focus and lessening patience turn increasingly to the uncomprehending immigrant flatlanders whose ridge-top mansions slide mud down into the tobacco farmers' streams and destroy the old ways of life. (See "Flatlanders Moving into the Mountains: 1976," pp. 193-197). Flatlanders destroy willy nilly the ancestral man's man, woman respecting religion of the mountaineers, replacing it with touchy-feely, do whatever feels good sexual lawlessness. The author tells of his skirmishes with the growing power of homosexuals in his church, and his well publicized excommunication as an unrepentant troublemaker. Green asserts the "significance of the gay movement not only in Asheville but nationwide, if not worldwide. It is perhaps the biggest story of this era" (p. 215). He amply documents his crafty but losing one-man aristeia (guerrilla skirmishes) against the cozy New Age Christians at All Souls Cathedral in Asheville.

In an appreciation of the novelist by Dr. Donald Secrest (reproduced pp. 227 - 235), Lewis Green is affectionately denoted as "A Sainted Crazy." Green does not so much plot his stories as bait traps for the unsuspecting reader. In other words, things are never as simple as they first seem. Green is seen as "practicing to become a prophet," deeply spiritual in a tradition no flatlander can ever grasp. But then, "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"

-OOO-