by David Isay
First published 1997
David Isay travels across America to document people who refuse to let go of their unique traditions and occupations. He visits Dewey Chafin and Barbara Elkins, who handle venomous snakes in their West Virginia church services. He meets Amos Powers, who tends the nation's sole cemetery for hunting dogs in Alabama. In California, he interviews Dixie Evans, who runs a museum dedicated to burlesque history. Mike Gashwarza of the Hopi tribe fights to keep electricity out of his ancient Arizona town. A castle builder, a Woolworth's waitress with four decades of service, a moonshiner, and the head of Brooklyn's checker club round out this collection of determined individualists. Harvey Wang provides portraits of all fifty subjects. These Americans face mounting pressure to abandon their chosen paths, but they persist against the odds. Their stories reveal the creativity and stubbornness required to maintain disappearing traditions in modern America.
Genres: social-issues, non-fiction, 21st-century, americana
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: determined-individualists, found-family
Setting: Alabama, America, Arizona, Brooklyn, California, West Virginia
Period: Modern
216 pages · Paperback · W. W. Norton & Company