Dorie: Woman of the Mountains

I follow a channel on YouTube called celebrating Appalachia and the host Tipper has a Friday series where she reads a story. We were reading this book and purchased it so that I could follow along. Dori's life was incredibly fascinating and I am glad that I purchased it.

Just love this book. It's written in a way that makes you feel you are right there, emotionally and sensibly experiencing it all, beginning when Dorie is a young child. This true story tells how the mountain people lived during the early 1900's, including the hardships, but above all revealing the love and devotion these sturdy mountain people have for each other. An especially poignant part is when Dorie's newborn sister dies when her ill mother is not able to feed her, and the father gently rocks the baby by the warmth of fireplace each night until she passes. This both moving and informative book is highly recommend.

Dorie is the history of every woman in East Tennessee who's family comes from "the mountains". A "must read" for any person seeking a peek back in time to what lives were like for those before us and the roots of where we come from.

DORIE: WOMAN OF THE MOUNTAINS is an excellent example of new history-making, literature in which one person's story is representative of an era and its people. Dorie's narration of her life in the Great Smoky Mountains during the earliest years of the twentieth century evokes memories of our own old folks and their storytelling. Her account of the often hardscrabble existence she and her family endured in the mountains of East Tennessee is not a depressing one, but a testimony of the pioneer spirit that helped build this nation. Dorie's life straddled the fence between the old ways and the modern age, a time when many people still worked to produce everything their families needed even as other people discovered all the things that money could purchase at the local store or through the Sears or Montgomery Ward catalogues. Education was not always as easily obtained. Jobs became increasingly hard to find as the area was developed into a national park and with the onset of the Great Depression. Through Dorie's story, we get an inside glimpse of life in an isolated but beautiful mountain wilderness, and the ways in which modernity simultaneously improved financial situations and contributed to the destruction of a uniquely American way of life.

Dorie:Woman of the Mountains is an excellent book. Very well written - you feel as if you are talking with Dorie herself as she chronicles her life in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. This book is so entertaining you want to read it in one sitting. I would highly recommend this book to everyone. It is a most enjoyable trip back in time.