Nestled discreetly along the border between the placid farmland and the hillbilly hills left by the last Ice Age in greater Kentucky - Indiana - Ohio, a specific culture has evolved in America's heartland. Actually, several contrasting cultures...

Nestled discreetly along the border between the placid farmland and the hillbilly hills left by the last Ice Age in greater Kentucky - Indiana - Ohio, a specific culture has evolved in America's heartland. Actually, several contrasting cultures that overlap but rarely mix. The author describes how this area became what it is today, a land of clapboard churches, limestone quarries, manufactured homes, Harley Davidson rallies, caves, distilleries, meth labs and gun stores, wine festivals and the bed-and-breakfast crowd. The book explores caves, wineries, distilleries, grand hotels, secular and ecclesiastical treasures as well as monuments to human hubris. It highlights weird religious groups who populated this region, the buckle of the Bible Belt, including the Harmonists, Owenites, Amish, Mennonites, Pentecostals, snake-handlers, backwoods preachers who gather their brethren for a "blessing of the bikes" (Harleys), and, of course, German Catholics, and it explores cemeteries and superstitions of the people who inhabit Kentuckiana, the majority of whom believe in ghosts and think that God created the world 6,000 years ago, glaciers notwithstanding.

This section of Southern Indiana is breathtakingly beautiful with its dense copse of woods, hills and hollows (they really do call them hollers here), century-old homes and barns, pastures filled with grazing horses and meandering creeks. There s a sense of it being a small moment in time preserved in amber, a sense which one feels more intensely if you travel here as people did 150 years ago. I can understand why many people still travel to Story by horseback. I have always loved Story and the land around it, and I always will.