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| | |  | |  | | | Last Mountain Dancer: Hard-Earned Lessons in Love, Loss, and Honky-Tonk Outlaw Life | | SKU:
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Usually ships in 1 business days | | Only 1 left in stock, order soon! | | | On sabbatical from his professorship at the University of Pittsburgh, native West Virginian Chuck Kinder (portrayed as Grady Tripp in Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys and played by Michael Douglas in the film) makes a midlife pilgrimage to his homeland to re-imagine and reconnect with that fabled, fantastic country. Confronting the regrets and heartaches of his past, present, and future, Kinder seeks solace in the funny and raunchy family stories, lies, legends, and history that reside in West Virginia's haunted hills and the hollows of his memory. But more than anything, Kinder wants to live it up hillbilly style. Immersing himself among the lives of mountaineer characters, both the quick and the dead, the bad-boy author bears holy witness to the triumphs and misdeeds of the loafers and misfits, winos and oddball characters of his homeland. Readers will be astonished by tales of bloody mine wars, outlaws on the run, roadhouse romance, barroom brawlers, beer-joint ballerinas, and a man who calls himself the last mountain dancer. With mothmen, moonshiners, and family feudists, it's Planet West Virginia. Chuck Kinder's wild-ride rediscovery of his West Virginian roots is sure to quicken all of our hillbilly hearts. | | | |
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| | Product Details | | Author: | Chuck Kinder | | Paperback: | 480 pages | | Publisher: | Da Capo Press | | Publication Date: | August 18, 2005 | | ISBN: | 0786716533 | | Package Length: | 8.5 inches | | Package Width: | 5.5 inches | | Package Height: | 1.5 inches | | Package Weight: | 1.35 pounds | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 1 reviews |
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8 of 9 found the following review helpful:
Best Mountain Writer Apr 22, 2005
Chuck Kinder's redneck roots have served him well. Last Mountain Dancer, his "meta-memoir," is taken up with his childhood home of West Virginia. Readers are treated to everything from his adolescent years as a bona fide outlaw, pulling armed robberies with a sociopathic father figure named Morris Hacket; to buying all his dear old mother's crocheted comforters from an "artsy-fartsy artiste type" proprietor of a craft store so that his mother, with months of no sales, wouldn't feel "lower than whale bowels on the bottom of the ocean;" to packing a half-dozen brazed possum sandwiches and long necked Budweisers and driving the West Virginia hills with his sister and brother-in-law; to his fascination with a paranoid West Virginia Elvis impersonator named Jessico White, the last mountain dancer of the title; to an impassioned defense of Sid Hatfield, the fabled coal miner's advocate murdered by West Virginian authorities in 1921. The book is stunning both for its honesty and for the force of his prose. Often, Kinder's most beautifully written prose accompanies descriptions of horrible events or the most painful self-discoveries. For example:
"There was absolutely no private mythology left behind what passed for my personality. Not unlike other foolish, floundering middle-aged men, I didn't believe in a thing that seemed to matter. My life had broken down like an old heap on the highway" (Dancer, p. 139).
And then, some two hundred pages later,
"I had begun to fancy myself as one of those uniquely American types who define themselves primarily in the loss and betrayal of themselves and what they love. For Proust (a somewhat similar European type), the only true paradise was a lost paradise, and love was not fully itself until it was lost, until it became memory, became the stuff of story. At its heart, every story is about a lost world... ." (p. 349).
After much soul searching and confronting of his foibles and doomed hopes, he decides to embark on a journey of self-discovery, aware of creating a new fable for himself and of his inconsistency:
"I was deep into my fable of embarkment. I was sipping ice-cold vodka straight like a seasoned hardboiled ironist and vaguely wondering if my upcoming self-proclaimed voyage of self-discovery would be in truth simply another frivolous fiction of self-invention. Steadfastly true at least to my inconstancy, I sat there in the monastery of myself thinking that the only thing I ever knew for sure was what I made up" (p. 381).
There is much to admire and enjoy in this book, written by the purported Grady Trip of "Wonderboy's" fame. Kinder has written three novels that also provide great literary experiences: "Silver Ghost," "Snakehunter," and "Honeymooners" (about his raucus life with Raymond Carver).
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