Non-fiction review: Trials of the Earth
Title: Trials of the Earth: The True Story of a Pioneer Woman Author: Mary Mann Hamilton; narrated by Barbara Benjamin Creel Publisher: Hachette Audio, 2016. Originally published 1992 by University Press of Mississippi, 259 pages. Source: Library digital resources Publisher's Summary: This wrenching memoir of love, courage, and survival was waiting to he told. Withheld for almost a lifetime, it is a tragic story of a woman's trial of surviving against brutal odds. Near the end of her life Mary Hamilton (1866-c.1936) was urged to record this astonishing narrative. It is the only known first-hand account by an ordinary woman depicting the extraordinary routines demanded in this time and this place. She reveals the unbelievably arduous role a woman played in the taming of the Delta wilderness, a position marked by unspeakably harsh, bone-breaking toil. On a raw November day in 1932 Helen Dick Davis entered a backwoods cabin in the Delta and encountered Mary Hamilton, a t...