Summary

Cancer Stories: Lessons in Love, Loss, and Hope gives a personal, in-depth look at people battling cancer and the friends and relatives who care for them. This book offers a poignant look at their lives and the effect that cancer has on them. Cancer Stories was the result of the Cancer Project sponsored by the Perley Isaac Reed School of Journalism at West Virginia University where journalism students were paired up with cancer patients in order to learn about their experiences. The large format book contains a series of photo essays and stories written in a narrative, highly accessible style. It is a must read for anyone interested in how cancer patients and their friends and relatives are able to find wonder and hope in one of life's most trying ordeals. Also included is a DVD of the award-winning documentary that inspired the book.

Table of Contents

• Foreword
    Christrine Martin
• Introduction
    Jennifer Roush
• He Keeps Going
    Grant Smith, photographs by Melissa Nethken
• Reconstruction
    Ivy Smith, photographs by Lingbing Hang
• As the Legacy Descends
    Jennifer Roush, photographs by Karina Gomes Dick
• Vernon M. Knode III
    Eunice Rohrere
• Banana Bread
    Jan Lauren Boyels, photographs by Barbara Griffin
• The Junction
    Katie Stout
• Remission
    Kelly Carr, photographs by Barbara Griffin and Melissa Nethken
• Stubborn Enough
    Pam Kasey, photographs by Courtney Balestier
• Listening for Cancer Stories
    David G. Allen

Author

John Temple and Joel Beeson are Assistant Professors of Journalism at the The Perley Isaac Reed School of Journalism at West Virginia University. Temple teaches news and feature-writing courses and heads the News-Editorial sequence. He is a creative nonfiction author and a former staff writer for the Tampa Tribune. Beeson's specialty area is visual journalism. He has an MA from the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Journalism and is doing doctoral work on social documentary and new media with marginalized communities.

Reviews

"Cancer Stories is a truly collaborative project, bringing together journalism students, cancer patients, physicians, nurses, and other health care providers. It provides an accurate, honest and occasionally heartbreaking look at what it means to have cancer."
Dr. Eddie Reed, former director, Mary Babb Randolph Cancer Center

Summary

This autobiography follows West Virginia senator Robert C. Byrd’s experiences from his boyhood in the early 1920s to his election in 2000, which won him an unprecedented eighth term in the Senate. Within these pages, Senator Byrd offers commentary on national and international events that occurred throughout his long life in public service. 

His journey from the hardscrabble coalfields to the marbled halls of Congress has inspired generations of people in West Virginia and throughout the nation. From reading the stories of the Founding Fathers as a young boy by the light of a kerosene lamp to the swearing of an oath for more than a half-century to guard the US Constitution, Senator Byrd’s life is legendary. 

Until his death on June 28, 2010, Byrd stood by his principles, earning the affection of the people of his home state and the respect of Americans from all walks of life. With his beloved Erma ever by his side, Robert C. Byrd never forgot his roots, harkening back to those early lessons that he learned as a child of the Appalachian coalfields.

This new paperback edition includes a foreword by Gaston Caperton, governor of West Virginia from 1989–1997.

Contents

1. Foreword by Gaston Caperton
2. Child of the Appalachian Coalfields
3. The Depression Years
4. A Political Career Begins
5. Mr. Byrd Goes to Washington
6. Around the World in Sixty-Six Days
7. Excelsior!
8. The Sapling Grows Tall
9. Stormy Waters
10. Climbing the Leadership Ladder
11. A Visit to Russia
12. Muddy Waters
13. A Supreme Court Nomination?
14. Building West Virginia Piece by Piece
15. The Old Order Changeth
16. The Top Rung—Majority Leader (1977)
17. Second Fiddle
18. Back in the Saddle Again
19. Elected President Pro Tempore
20. A Hand on the Purse Strings
21. Building a New West Virginia
22. West Virginia on thr Go
23. Bits and Pieces
24. Building a 21st Century West Virginia
25. The Winds of Change
26. The Tide Ebbs
27. Full Circle
28. The Return of the Native
29. Dribs and Drabs
30. Line-Item Veto Struck Down
31. In the Heat of Battle
32. Semper Fidelis
33. Afterword

Reviews

"Isn't this the true American story for this century? A complete turnabout in one's life raised in Crabtree, West Virginia in an environment of racism. This story is a complete compilation of someone overcoming that old battle of nature vs. nurture."
Ryan Swanek

"For those who want a personal and in-depth account of the senator's life and career, this book is essential reading."
Goldenseal

Summary

Blanche Lazzell went from Maidsville, West Virginia to the leading edge of twentieth-century American art. A member of the prominent art communities of Paris and Provincetown, Massachusetts during the '20s and '30s, Lazzell was always on the fringe of important developments in the modern art world. Her studies in Paris led her to adopt the techniques of modernism as well as other emerging styles. Among her groundbreaking works were some of the first examples of abstraction in America. Blanche Lazzell: The Life and Work of an American Modernist is a significant contribution to the history of twentieth-century American art.

Know primarily as a Provincetown printmaker, Lazzell’s full life and career are presented here, generously accompanied by color reproductions of her work, showing the breadth of her accomplishment in painting, printmaking, and hooked rugs. Lazzell's true contribution to American art history was never fully appreciated during her lifetime. A renewed interest in the artist has developed over past decades, due mostly to the critical appreciation of her color wood block prints. She is worth remembering not only for her own work, but also for her role as a translator of the achievements of the European modernists for her colleagues in America. In Blanche Lazzell: The Life and Work of an American Modernist, nine essays and hundreds of full-color illustrations bring this incredibly talented and influential artist's work to life.

Contents

• List of Figures
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
    Robert Bridges
• Chapter 1: Blanche Lazzell Biography
    Susan M. Doll
• Chapter 2: Art Studies in America at the Begining of the Twentieth Century
    Bernard Schultz and Kari Graham Reckart
• Chapter 3: The Decorative Work
    Lynn Proden
• Chapter 4: A Modernist's GRand Tour
    Michael Slaven
• Chapter 5: Studies in France, 1912—13
    Mary Louise Soldo Schultz
• Chapter 6: The Provincetown Print
    David Acton
• Chapter 7: Studying with Albert Glezes in 1924
    Peter Brooke
• Chapter 8: The Federal Arts Projects, 1934—39
    Marlene Park
• Chapter 9: Walls and Windows: Drawings and Paintings
    Jennifer Boggess
• Plates
• Chonology
• Contributers
• Index

Author

Robert C. Bridges is curator of both the West Virginia University Art Collection and Mesaros Galleries, where he teaches curatorial studies. He has an M.F.A. in printmaking from West Virginia University. He is curator of Blanche Lazzell: The Work of an American Modernist (2004) and co-curator of Blanche Lazzell: The Hoffman Drawings (2004).

Kristina Olson is an assistant professor of art history at West Virginia University. She has an M.A. in contemporary art criticism and history from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her teaching and research are in the fields of modern and contemporary art and architecture. She curated Frozen Architecture (2003) and is co-curator of Blanche Lazzell: The Hoffman Drawings (2004).

Janet Snyder is associate professor of art history at West Virginia University. She holds an M.F.A. in design for theater from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in art history from Columbia University, where her fields were Gothic art and architecture and Native North American art. She co-edited Medieval Textiles and Dress: Object, Image, and Text (2003).

Reviews

"This book will be essential for studies of modernism, as well as for art libraries and serious collectors of American art."
Joann G. Moser, Senior Curator, Smithsonian American Art Museum and author Singular Impressions: The Monotype in America

"A fascinating, detailed story of an artist's life... perhaps the definitive account of [Blanche Lazzell's] life and the significance of her career."
Anne Price, The Sunday Advocate

"A tribute to a singular talent that is as distinctive and multi-faced as her work."
Dale Blaine, ForeWord Magazine

"With wonderful illustrations and a helpful chronology, this is an interesting, important book."
R. M. Labuz, Choice Magazine

"Magnificent."
George Brosi, Appalachian Heritage

"A beautiful book."
R.K. Dickson, The Bloomsbury Review

"This monograph should serve as a wake-up call: there are a lot of excellent artists - particularly women artists - still being ignored, eclipsed by lesser, more colorful ones, in large part because they suffer the common fate of being discretely modest."
Mary Sherman, Journal of Appalachian Studies

Summary

Kartoon Kings is the first monographic and comprehensive analysis of the graphic artwork of Simon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio. This work showcases a collection of full-color images excerpted from comic book projects, videos, billboards, and more of the artists’ collaborative public contributions created over the past fifteen years. To supplement the images an interview with the artists by Kristina Olson is included, along with essays by Joshua Decter and Paul Krainak. Grennan and Sperandio work together by conspiring about their creative ideas on the Internet. Their teamwork must be done this way because Grennan lives in England, while Sperandio lives in the United States.

More of Sperandio and Grennan’s work can be seen at www.kartoonkings.com.

Author

Christopher Sperandio was born in Kingwood, West Virginia and studied art at West Virginia University and painting at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Simon Grennan was born in London, England and studied sculpture at the University of Reading and the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Reviews

"Mr. Grennan and Mr. Sperandio tweak our notion of what art is and who it is for."
Roberta Smith, The New York Times

Summary

Early Art and Artists in West Virginia is illustrated copiously with 136 plates accompanying the essays on portraiture and landscape painting, which form the first half of the book. A similar number of smaller illustrations in full color bring life to a biographical directory in the second part of the book, which contains nearly one thousand known painters who worked in West Virginia. Many West Virginians will find their family names in this directory, and some will doubtless locate the information here that they have long sought in order to learn more about a painting in their family's possession. The book is supported by an extensive bibliography on the state's artistic heritage and a full index to both the directory and the essays.

2001 American Graphic Design Awards Winner
A Wonderful West Virginia Magazine Book of the Month

Contents

• Foreword
• Part I
• Prologue
• Early Portraiture in West Virginia
• Landscape Artists, Illustrators, and More
• Looking Forward
• Epilogue
• Notes on the Text
• Part II
• Biographical Directory
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Index

Author

John A. Cuthbert, Curator of the West Virginia and Regional History Collection and Director of the West Virginia Historical Art Collection at the West Virginia University Libraries, has drawn upon years of personal study of the development of fine painting in West Virginia to write this history of the state's artistic heritage from its beginnings in the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. He suggests that we have focused so intently on our rich traditions derived from the culture of mountain folk that we have overlooked the fact that most of our state's population has always been concentrated in the river valleys and in the Eastern Panhandle where communication and transportation were readily available. In such circumstances, West Virginians were no less sophisticated than their neighbors in bordering states and portrait and landscape painters found ready patrons for their works here.

Reviews

"Early Art and Artists in West Virginia provides an impressive body of research, well-written and well-documented. I see this as an excellent example of a growing number of studies in which individual states are recording their artistic heritages, and none is perhaps more varied or interesting than West Virginia's."
Jessie Poesch, author The Art of the Old South

"With modesty, Cuthbert... describes his study as 'only a beginning.' Most will agree that this is far more than that; for the foreseeable future, it will be the undisputed reference on the subject."
Joan Stahl, The Smithsonian American Art Museum

"An incredible collection."
Bill Archer, The Bluefield Daily Telegraph

"No one who spends time with Cuthbert's book will ever doubt that West Virginia has a long and active artistic tradition."
John Douglas, The Morgan Messenger

Summary

The Inside Pitch and More: Baseball’s Business and the Public Trust, written by former American League President Gene Budig, investigates the human and corporate sides of our nation’s pastime. Throughout the course of this book, the author systematically engages the myriad concerns of Major League Baseball, past, present, and future.

In The Inside Pitch and More, baseball’s economic prosperity is examined, as well as issues that hinder and threaten that perpetuity. Lately, baseball has been increasingly menaced by the popularity of other athletic venues - basketball, football, etc. Budig goes through the proposed methods of revitalizing the game of baseball. He emphasizes the need for a reevaluation of the relationship between the sport and its fan base so that the baseball will resume its role as America’s favorite pastime.

Based on his six years as president of the American League, Budig has composed a fascinating book, which is written to be enjoyed by the casual baseball fan as well as the serious student of this sport or sports management in general. The book is unique in that it is the first work to really dissect the sport of baseball by a retired high-ranking official with a wealth of information on the subject.

Contents

-1. Acknowledgements
0. Introduction
1. A Matter of Time
2. Of Importance to Many
3. It is a Financial Issue
4. Winners Everywhere
5. A Quick Lesson in History
6. Things Were Changing
7. Seeds of Change Were Sown
8. A Game on the Ropes
9. Mounting Evidence
10. Sports, a Large Enterprise
11. A Welcome Outcome
12. Sharing the Wealth
13. Growing the Game in the 2000s
14. One Path to Econommic Growth
15. A Game Set Apart
16. Where It All Started
17. Twice a Winner
18. The People Who Run the Game
19. A Time of Change
20. Not Your Average Job
21. The Economic Case of the 2000s
22. The Designated Hitter's Time Has Come
23. The Reformatted All-Star Game
24. The Rose Dilemma
25. A Thought on Sammy Sosa
26. The Challenge Facin College Athletics
27. Sports and Modern Journalism
28. The Importance of Competitiveness
29. Added Thoughts
30. Readings
31. About the Author

Author

Gene Budig was the president of Major League Baseball's American League from 1994 to 1999.

Reviews

"Anyone who enjoys or cares about the game of baseball will find The Inside Pitch very enjoyable."
Ted D. Ayres

"The Inside Pitch... and More is not inside; it's right over the plate for a terrific strike."
Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today

"[The Inside Pitch] explores many complex issues facing the game with unusual clarity."
Bud Selig, Commissioner of Major League Baseball

"[The Inside Pitch] is fair and balanced, and its contents should be of interest to anyone following the course of baseball."
Bob DuPuy, President of Major League Baseball