Sitting Up with the Dead by Pamela Petro Reviewed by Steve Rudd

In the manic style of Bill Bryson, Pamela Petro gets in her car and heads out around America in search of exciting new people, places and - above else - fantastic stories. Confining her extensive travels to the Eastern side of North America and, in particular, the South-East states of Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas (to name a few), Pamela embarks on a fascinating and hugely engaging journey in order to embroil herself in the age-old tradition of story-telling, a past-time that is still popular in such areas of the USA where entertainment in the form of television (for example) isn't a priority.

When many people think of America they wrongly assume that almost everybody over there is blessed with hard cash and little poverty, but in the deep south times are still hard in certain areas, while in the beautiful Appalachian mountains there are farms and small villages that remain as far removed from modern-day civilisation and technology as they were perhaps one hundred years ago.

Pamela sets out scooting about on four separate journeys, meeting fascinating people as she goes who all tell her a story: a story that more often than not has been passed down to them over the years from past generations. The type of short stories she is told (all of which she recorded on a Dictaphone and then painstakingly transcribed for inclusion in this book) range from quirky moralistic fables to chilling ghost stories, and old Brer Rabbit even gets a look in.

Sitting Up With The Dead is a magnificently refreshing read, providing a glimpse of America that is rarely seen or acknowledged as being in existence. Many of the stories have been borne out of the American South's troubled history, given the extent of slavery that consumed the Southern States and the violence that naturally exploded over time as a byproduct of the inhumane way that the blacks were treated by white people.

Each and every one of the twenty short stories that are reproduced within are charming, compelling and occasionally haunting in their own rights. What's more, Sitting Up With The Dead does also read like a travel book (the city of Charleston - in South Carolina - we learn, for example, is the oldest English city south of Virginia, one of only three walled cities in North America, and was the richest city in America before the Civil War), seen as though Pamela gets around to so many places and is such a skilled writer.

As a result, such intoxicating elements of travel, historical heritage and sheer human drama all coalesce to make this book one of the most riveting, informative and touching reads in recent times... and the type of book that every kid should be given to study in schools, Amen. ISBN 0-00-655208-0 (published by Flamingo in 2002) www.fireandwater.com