From Ridgetops to Riverbottoms takes the reader on a journey down the many winding roads of the outdoor experience in Tennessee. Such a journey requires a seasoned guide, and there can be no better one than journalist Sam Venable, who has written about the woods and waters of his native state for the past twenty-five years. For Venable, the outdoor world is meant to be enjoyed. Whether he is casting popping bugs to bluegills during the frenzy of a willow fly hatch, lying motionless on his back in muddy corn stubble as mallards warily circle his decoys, savoring the sounds and scents of a...

From Ridgetops to Riverbottoms takes the reader on a journey down the many winding roads of the outdoor experience in Tennessee. Such a journey requires a seasoned guide, and there can be no better one than journalist Sam Venable, who has written about the woods and waters of his native state for the past twenty-five years. For Venable, the outdoor world is meant to be enjoyed. Whether he is casting popping bugs to bluegills during the frenzy of a willow fly hatch, lying motionless on his back in muddy corn stubble as mallards warily circle his decoys, savoring the sounds and scents of a...

Despite his alleged inability to enjoy a meaningful relationship with Mother Nature, Sam Venable is, indeed, an outdoor enthusiast. He is at home in trout streams and duck blinds, bass boats and deer stands. He has traveled from Alaska to the Bahamas, but he is most comfortable in the fields and forests of his native East Tennessee. This collection of some of his best outdoor columns from the Knoxville News-Sentinel includes stories in Sam s unique style about fishing, hunting, and just enjoying the outdoors.
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In his own humorous style, Knoxville News-Sentinel columnist Sam Venable takes us through the seasons on the calendar. He has been celebrating the seasons since he was a child and recognized four seasons--Christmas, Birthday, Out-of-School, and In-School. Since then he's added a few more to his calendar--dove, duck, deer, rabbit, quail trukey, trout, fly fishing season. You get the idea. As Sam said, "I was able to cram 28 months of activity into each 12-month period." This collection of columns includes celebrations of Groundhog Day to summer to election day to the snows of winter. Cartoons...

Hazel Pendley creates heirloom-quality quilts. Ed Ripley wraps bits of fur and feathers into trout flies the size of gnats. Edna Hartong still makes an item that has all but disappeared from the American scene: lye soap.
All of these people, and many more like them, are Appalachians who work with their hands. Journalist Sam Venable and photographer Paul Efird spent four years combing the hills and hollows of Southern Appalachia to find these talented individuals and let them talk about their work. Mountain Hands is an intimate look at more than three dozen such craftspeople and their...

Carson Brewer on ... "Mountain Places Snow was nice and crunchy underfoot. Not crunchy like peanuts or cornflakes. Rather, it was a silky, whispery crunchy. "Mountain Plants You can bury your nose deep in the cool violet bed and smell the mix of life and death while pondering the unceasing cycle of each into the other. "Mountain People Lem Ownby.... has plowed oxen, mules, horses on the forty-four acre farm on Jakes Creek. But he has never owned or driven an automobile.

Sam Venable is one of America s seventy-six million Baby Boomers who are turning into their parents. He can t quite see without his reading glasses, he thinks the music kids listen to these days is nothing but a loud racket, and his belt is mysteriously creeping up higher and higher on his chest.
The way Venable figures it, he s roaring along the road (at about twenty-seven miles per hour, the average speed for someone his age) to Codgerville. You Gotta Laugh to Keep From Cryin highlights the observations and lifestyle changes (and a few other things he can t quite seem to remember at the...

In sixteen thoroughly engaging essays, naturalist Stephen Lyn Bales ventures far and wide among the richly diverse flora and fauna of his native Tennessee Valley. Whether describing the nocturnal habits of the elusive whip-poor-will, the pivotal role the hedge plant Osage orange played in a key Civil War battle, or the political firestorm that attended the discovery of a tiny fish dubbed the snail darter, Bales illuminates in surprising ways the complicated and often vexed relationships between humans and their neighbors in the natural world.
Accompanied by the author's striking line...

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Tennessee humorist Sam Venable has been tickling funny bones in print for more than twenty-five years. Someday I May Find Honest Work is a collection of 125 of his columns, many of which originally appeared in the Knoxville News Sentinel. In these warm and witty pieces, Venable pokes good-natured fun at everything from fast food to government folly, from high-tech confusion to the perils of aging, from the eternal strife between the sexes to daily life in East Tennessee.
Four days a week, Venable chronicles life and all the strange and absurd things that...