Very skillfully edited by Betty Rivard, this book collects photographs and letters by New Deal photographers from the Farm Security Administration who were sent to document the lives of the people of West Virginia. The photographers--Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Marion Post Walcott, and others--were remarkable, and their black and white images resonate with an astonishing mix of the foreign and the familiar. What pathos is present is never forced. The pictures have the intimacy of snapshots, and the faces, particularly of children, leap from the frame and demand to be known. The landscapes where people struggle with grinding poverty are often lovely. These tiny towns, company stores, horse-drawn wagons, whistle stops, and postered clapboard walls were photographed during the Great Depression and the early 1940s but seem 19th century, their poverty not visible as squalor but as plainness, everything pared down and endlessly made to do. The men sitting on the railroad tracks wear their Sunday best on Sundays, though perhaps one has no socks; they are black and white together, Jim Crow erased by coal dust. A prize cow seems massive, miraculous. The photographers write of learning cotton from a cotton man before boarding the West Virginia train (for an eye that is not ignorant is better set to see), of finding dignity and welcome among the unemployed miners they had thought to fear, and loaded guns and paranoia among the captains of industry whose houses they'd imagined were safe havens. In short essays and letters about their experiences, they write like their pictures: plain-spoken, humane, curious, unsentimental. The overwhelming impression of the book is of the level of detail we see in the very best historical movies, with the startling understanding that what makes reality different is the people who populate these landscapes were never extras. Each face looks back, erasing time, the hero of a story we suddenly want to know. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) Read Less