Shake Terribly the Earth

"In this linked collection of essays, Sarah Beth Childers takes the stories she grew up listening to and uses them to make sense of her own personal journey in a thoughtful, humorous voice born of Appalachian storytelling. Based on interviews, letters, archives, and memory, these essays bring to life events that touched the entire region: large families that squeezed into tiny apartments during the Great Depression, a girl who stepped into a rowboat from a second-story window during Huntington, West Virginia's 1937 flood, brothers who were whisked away to World War II and Vietnam, and a young man who returned home from the South Pacific and worked his life away as a railroad engineer. The book also demonstrates the ways our hearts and lives take root in our own particular patches of Appalachia. The author's mother, Marcy, listens to fundamentalist Christian radio evangelists, pays for her mentally ill mother's food and cigarettes with a part-time job at a department store, longs for love, and dreams of becoming a majorette. Years later, Sarah Beth attends Marcy's chosen church, a Pentecostal congregation where members blow whistles and run circles around the sanctuary with lampshades on their heads, and she faces her own love problems at a fundamentalist Baptist school, where she feels isolated as one of the school's few Pentecostals. Sarah Beth's experiences allow her to tackle fundamentalist Christianity as an insider, admitting its flaws but also showing the positive side of such ardent belief. Throughout this book, Sarah Beth seeks to find her own place within the fundamentalist Christian community and her family, and she looks for the joy and clarity that often emerge after times of tragedy and change, when the earth shakes terribly beneath us"--