The human interest stories and reviews in this book are woven from the author's forty-plus years of experience as a prize-winning reporter, an author, an editor-publisher, a college professor and an undercover investigator for local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, and for the East Tennessee Attorney General. The stories are set in the often mysterious and closed-in back mountain country of Western North Carolina before it began filling up with outlanders, and the relatively cosmopolitan Asheville-Buncombe County area of another time, which includes interviews with Carl Sandburg, Martin Luther King Jr., Julian Bond, etc. The stories range from the subtle and wry political wit of the mountaineers to often hilarious trials in Superior Court to the trial in Federal Court of the man who sold off most of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the 1960s to bloody demonic murders and the tragedy of simple people growing old. There are lawyers and cops, political and law-enforcement corruption. The author handles much of it with the blunt irony and wit of a native writer.