Word: carmers
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...Carl Carmer's book, subtitled "A York State Chronicle", is an attempt to catch the glamor of a part of our country almost totally neglected by contemporary writers. Having done his part by the South in "Stars Fell on Alabama", an engaging potpourri of myths, sketches, and experiences of Alabama, he turns to his native state in the present instance in a somewhat confused and confusing piece of copy that is part rationale, part travelog, part apology, part local-color journalism, but which holds the reader's interest throughout...
...Genesee country, and through the Bristol Hills. It follows an aimless route in the Rochester-Geneseo-Buffalo area, through to the Binghamton-Ithaca "Storm Country", "Down the Bear Path Road" of Central New York, up North to the Adirondacks, "Land of Frozen Flame." Hit and miss Mr. Carmer picks up local anecdotes, Indian superstitions, regional customs, scenic wonders, as he goes. It is a peculiar system of newsgathering he uses, here depending on what he sees and knows, here taking in the stories of rural raconteurs, rarely bothering with actual substantiation of what he says--now poeticizing the life...
...Author Carmer's approach to Northern New York is suggested by the romantic legend that gives his book its title. Sometimes dwellers there hear a sound of distant drumbeats. Are they made by the ghost of an English officer executed during the Revolution? Are they echoes of the death drums of the Senecas? In this fertile field of supernaturalism mystics, fanatics, founders of religious faiths and Utopian colonies have long bred in the Empire State's northern hills. Author Carmer says that the roar of the cities overwhelms the sound of the drum, which may be interpreted...
...Genesee Valley, Author Carmer went to revival meetings where the hysterical confessions of repentant sinners ranged from the grotesque to the pathetic, where two little girls tormentedly admitted that under the excitement of the previous night's revival they had walked home with their boy friends and done things they should not have done. Before such contemporary and embarrassing evidence of the persistence of the religious moods that inspired Joseph Smith and John Humphrey Noyes, Author Carmer maintains an aloof compassion, avoiding sentimentality as well as the mockery which used to animate Critic Henry Mencken when he wrote about...
...caught a rattlesnake himself, interviewed two surviving Shakers in Mount Lebanon, lived in the famed Oneida Community, went to a cockfight near Syracuse, always tried to find, in the local customs, turns of speech, characteristics, meaningful survivals from the richly spiritual past. Even readers who feel that Author Carmer has mistaken the pulsebeat of his own psychic interests for distant drumbeats are likely to be impressed by this sympathetic account of oddments in his native State...