Good Books Make Great Gifts

The holidays are approaching, and once again you have no idea what to give your beloved Uncle Fergus. He owns a string of Pizza Huts, has houses on Emerald Isle and Key West, and lives in a mansion above Maggie Valley. What do you give a man who has everything?

Then there’s Aunt Ida. She turns 50 next month, the entire clan is gathering to celebrate the grand event, and you are stumped. Last year you present her with a box of chocolates, only to learn she was on the Whole 30 Program. The previous year, you bought her tickets to a Beach Boys’ concert at the Biltmore House, discovering later that she had passed them on to her daughter, sniffing “Everyone knows I’m a Dylan fan.”

What to do? What the blazes do you give such people?

Well, books, of course. But not just any books. You need to give these hard cases—and quite often, your friends and family—books with universal appeal.

The Great Smoky Mountains: A Visual Journey offers readers—make that viewers—page after page of exquisite photographs of the Smokies. Husband-and-wife team Lee Mandrell and DeeDee Niederhouse-Mandrell have put together a gallery of photographs that reminds us why more visitors make their way to the Great Smoky Mountains than to any other national park. The photographers visited the Smokies in all four seasons, taking pictures of wildlife, deserted cabins, churches and mills, long panoramic shots of valleys and mountains, close-ups of butterflies, and trillium. Some of the winter photographs—turkeys in the snow, icy stalactites clinging to a rock cliff on Laurel Road, a rusting antique pickup at Ely’s Mill—are especially striking. 

Accompanying each photograph is a title for the picture and its location. One photo taken in Cade’s Cove shows a black bear seated on its haunches, its tongue lolling out of its mouth. The title? “Photographers Look Delicious.”

As I ambled through these photos, I realized that each truly was a work of art. In “Remnants of a Driveway, Cade’s Cove,” for example, we see what was once a road, now covered by grass and fallen trees, winding off into the distance. The soft light and gnarled trees lining the road gives the scene a fantastical beauty, as if the road led not to some mountain home but to a castle complete with a sleeping princess.

One final note: in their “Acknowledgments,” Lee and Dee-Dee pay a lovely tribute to their marriage, their life together, and their parents. That shared love and respect surely make their way into these spectacular photographs.

A sturdy companion to these photographs may be found in Smokies Chronicle: A Year of Hiking in Great Smoky Mountains National Park (John F. Blair Publisher, 2017, 183 pages). In 2016, the centennial anniversary of the National Park Service, Ben Anderson of Asheville, North Carolina, decided to celebrate the occasion by hiking 400 miles of trails in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. By the end of the year, he had completed 40 of these day hikes, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by his wife Karen or his sons, Ben and Rob. 

The result of these treks is Smokies Chronicle, containing the pieces Anderson wrote after each hike. We follow him through all four seasons along trails in North Carolina and Tennessee, taking pleasure in his memories of so many other years of hiking, learning from him about the flora and fauna of the Smokies, picking up interesting bits of history and trivia, and finally thanking the powers that be, as Anderson repeatedly does, that the park exists and continues to bring its many gifts to its visitors.

Before taking up this year of hiking and the subsequent writing of his book, Anderson served for over 20 years as a volunteer for the park service, patrolling trails and participating in the Adopt-A-Campsite program. The knowledge Anderson gained during this time adds to the substance of Smokies Chronicle. In his visit to Cataloochee Valley, for example, he briefly visits the graves of Levi Shelton and Elsie Caldwell, murdered by Union raiders. A couple of paragraphs later, he writes: “Back on the main trail, in the shadow of a large silverbell, I spot my first woodland wildflowers of the year: two bloodroots in bloom, matching their reputation as faithful harbingers of spring.” In this single sentence, we encounter a man who is not only well versed in the life and ways of the mountain forests, but a writer with a sharp eye for detail.

Adding to the value of this guidebook are the Anderson’s directions on how to reach certain trails, a rough map of the trails he followed, the length of each hike, and an index.

Smokies Chronicle will satisfy both veteran and novice trekkers, and should also attract the interest of those who simply love our mountains.

So there you have the solution to Uncle Fergus and Aunt Ida. You also have two fine, new books for your own pleasure and perusal.