Books: American Folk Feud

THE HATFIELDS AND THE McCoys (293 pp.)—Virgil Carrington Jones—Chapel Hill ($3.75),

This little book is almost a masterpiece. Particularly in its early chapters (the later ones grow somewhat confused with the ramifications of the feud), it summons up the life of the mountains in the days before the fighting began: little streams, dropping 25 feet to the mile, with names like Grapevine, Blackberry, Sulphur, Sycamore, Turkey and Buffalo; old families of English stock bearing names like Vance, Chafin, Smith, Weddington, Varney, Cline and Trent; forests of oak, cherry, walnut, hickory, linden, beech, sycamore;...