The Call of the Hawk
by Jay Banks
Publish America, 2004
This novel is based on the true story of the captivity of Margaret Handley Paulee Erskine by the Shawnee in 1779. Mrs. Erskine was in her 80s when she dictated the story of her captivity to her grandson, and according to family tradition, it is the only time that she spoke of her experience as a captive.
Margaret’s family was attacked by Indians as they began their move from the Greenbrier region to Kentucky. Shortly after her abduction, she realized that she was already pregnant with a son. She lived for six years with the tribe until her release. When it was time for Margaret to return to her own people, her son was reluctant, for the tribe was all the family he knew.
The long journey the mother and son made to get back to their family was treacherous, yet educational. They made and lost friends, and battled disease and hard times during their arduous journey.
Campus Delicti
by Lloyd Davis
IUniverse, 2005
When Professor Bud Harkness is found dead, Dan Quarrier, an old friend and colleague, is not convinced that his friend committed suicide. This murder mystery is set near the campus of Allegheny State University, and is infused with the distinctive Pittsburgh dialect and mentions many familiar Pittsburgh landmarks.
Dan, along with some help, investigates the mysterious circumstances of Bud’s death. While digging into the details, Dan turns up some disturbing information regarding the victim and his past relationships in the university community.
The Feminine
by Weam Namou
Hermiz Publishing, 2004
Chaldean American novelist Weam Namou bases this fictitious novel on events from her life.
Set in America and the Middle East during the early 1990s, a mother wants to arrange a marriage for her son Michael. But, knowing he will resist her, asks for help from her sister, Suham. Suham takes to the task with determination. She convinces her nephew to give an arranged marriage a chance. Along the way, Michael and his mother face truths hidden within themselves.
Afflicting the Comfortable: Journalism and Politics in West Virginia
by Thomas Stafford
WVU Press, 2005
For three decades, WVU alumnus and West Virginia journalist Thomas F. “Tom” Stafford lived to the letter the old investigative reporter’s adage of breaking and covering stories that “comfort the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable.”
And now the WVU Press has released a memoir by the venerable Beckley and Charleston reporter who died in 1993.
Stafford stirs the good, bad, and ugly of Mountain State politics from the 1940s through the 1990s, and also takes readers on a klieg light country roadside trip into 1960—the year John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey duked it out here for the Democratic Party primary and a shot at the White House.
From the crushing poverty and strike wars of the southern coalfields to the backlash of Brown v. the Board of Education, Stafford was there with his notebook to chronicle the human condition in the Mountain State.
And his integrity and stubborn tenacity led to the uncovering of what would be the story of his career: the “Invest Right” scandal of Barron’s administration, where it would come to light that the governor and several top aides had rigged state contracts and bids for other services in a web that tangled 17 different companies from Ohio to Florida.
Fresh Fish: A Civil War Prisoner’s Story
by E. Lynn Miller
McClain Printing Company, 2003
The author’s great-great-grandfather was a Confederate soldier who was captured in Jane Lew in May 1863. The author traces his grandfather’s incarceration in several Union prisons through family memories, letters, prison records, and more found in the National Archives in Washington, DC.
The details of Isaac Moore Gregory’s life in battle and prison contains detailed accounts of everything from his height (he was five foot, seven inches tall) to his wages ($11.00 per month). It tells of the Jones-Imboden Raid and the trail of paperwork left when transferring Gregory’s from prison to prison, along with the squalid prison conditions, including prisoners’ diary entries.