Reviews and Photos  — Eddie Price Books

What Others Are Saying About One Drop — A Slave!

“Widder's Landing is a banquet of first-person Kentucky history served up with plenty of first-rate adventure.  More history than fiction; a total immersion in real life Kentucky. Readers will hope this first novel won't be Eddie Price's last. "

Virginia G. Carter
Executive Director
Kentucky Humanities Council, Inc.
TELLING KENTUCKY’S STORY

“Widder’s Landing draws the reader into the life of Craig Ridgeway as he leaves behind a world of betrayal and misfortune. Eddie Price masterfully sets the story on the stage of Kentucky as the state shed her pioneer heritage in exchange for commercial success and political power. This novel is a must read for students of history and fans of riveting prose.”

J. Trace Kirkwood
Local Records Regional Administrator
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives

"Eddie Price explores the vital role Kentucky played during our Second War for Independence with Great Britain. Widder's Landing is a well-researched and comprehensive historical overview of Kentucky's role in the War of 1812, a penetrating look into the lives of Kentuckians during this tumultuous time in the history of Kentucky and our nation. Highly recommended as a military and social treatment of a forgotten and overlooked war."

JOHN M. TROWBRIDGE
Command Historian
Joint Forces Headquarters, Kentucky National Guard
Boone National Guard Center

“Widder's Landing is a non-stop adventure. Love, war, earthquakes and outlaws -- Eddie Price navigates his characters through natural and human-made disasters with passion and aplomb.”

Neil Chethik, Director of the Carnegie Institute, Lexington, Kentucky and author of FatherLoss: How Sons Deal with the Deaths of Their Fathers.

Award winning author to speak at library

Thursday night program will detail book about War of 1812

By Lisa King Shelby Sentinel-News, Shelbyville, KY

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Shelby County Public Library officials say they are excited about an upcoming appearance Thursday night by award winning author Eddie Price.

Price will be at the library from 6 to 7 p.m. to promote his new book, Widder’s Landing.

Marketing Director Linda Mahone said that the event is the first time Price will visit the library and that his presentation should be interesting.

“He does different programs for the Kentucky Humanities, and he’ll be dressed up in costume,” she said.

Price, a retired history teacher from Hancock County, will talk about his novel and Kentucky's vital role in the War of 1812.

Price grew up in western Kentucky and taught for 36 years as a high school history teacher and college instructor. After retiring from teaching, he wrote the 568-page novel, which he describes as "a story of life, love and survival set against the rugged early Kentucky frontier."

He will share how the characters depict that time period – covering such subjects as cabin raising, tobacco farming, whiskey making, outlaws, comets, eclipses, earthquakes and romance. He will also discuss the way of life for people in frontier days, what was going on in Kentucky, America, and the world in the arenas of politics, religion and economics. 

Price describes his program as crowd-engaging program, adding that the Kentucky Historical Society endorses it. He will be dressed in authentic costume and will be bringing a slideshow and period music to enhance the narrative.

Widder's Landingis now in its fourth printing at Acclaim Press and the novel has garnered numerous awards and accolades. It won the "Spirit of 1812 Award" from the U.S. Daughters of 1812 and the Gold Medal for "Best Historical Fiction" at the 2013 Readers Favorite Awards in Miami.

The Kentucky State Senate honored Widder's Landing on the Senate floor, with copies presented to Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear and former President Bill Clinton. The novel has been featured in several pioneer and Kentucky magazines, and has been endorsed by the Kentucky Arts Council, the Kentucky Humanities Council, the Kentucky Historical Society and the Kentucky Department of Libraries and Archives.

Price said that in the War of 1812, Kentucky would suffer 64 percent off all the American casualties, adding that most historical fiction novels set in Kentucky deal with pre-statehood frontier life, and then there is a major fast-forward to the Civil War.

“My novel covers four of those in-between years and it shows how people lived, day-to-day, in those precarious times,” he said.

Book Review: 'Widder’s Landing' | Kentucky's history is part of love story

Written by
Mary Popham

Special to the Courier-Journal

Review by Mary Popham, Special to the Courier- Journal

Eddie Price has written a love story interwoven with a thoroughly researched and well-written history.

In 1811 in Lancaster, Penn., apprentice gunsmith Craig Ridgeway loses his position when the owner of the gun shop dies. Ridgeway packs his few belongings and heads west. During heavy rainfall on a flatboat coming down the Ohio River, he contracts pneumonia and lands in Breckinridge County, Ky., where his life is saved by a hideous outlaw widow. He helps her with farm work and when she dies, she bequeaths Widder’s Landing to him. He falls in love with Mary McDonnell and marries into the Irish Catholic family that owns the connecting farm.

Through the Ridgeways and McDonnells, the author describes how hard our ancestors worked. “Craig could scarcely believe the labor required to run such a little farm.” Each page is filled with the daily chores of milking cows and feeding chickens to such phenomena as the arrival of “a giant comet close to Halley’s in brightness,” or swarms of migrating birds that darken the sky. Each season's crop is detailed: trading or purchasing the tools, horses and oxen for the plowing; saving or buying the seed for planting; hoeing and gathering corn, oats, hemp, and tobacco.

Members of the community help one another in almost every chore, from building the houses and barns, to corn-shucking, hog-killing, transforming flax to cloth, suckering, worming, stripping, and hanging tobacco, rolling cigars, and hauling the fruits of the fields to market. I have never read a more detailed account of how bourbon whiskey is made.

Price explains what is going on around the state and the country with stories of traveling priests and preachers, riverboat trips to New Orleans, the New Madrid earthquake, and river pirates and outlaws who must be subdued. He describes the Battle of Tippecanoe and a year later, the War of 1812, sometimes referred to as “The Second War of Independence,” when the young men go off to war. He writes an extensive side-story of slavery and how Craig and Mary Ridgeway purchase slaves to set them free, giving them paying jobs on their farm.

Price’s writing is clear, and his scenes chock-full of color and reality from war and death, to birth and love-making. “Widder’s Landing” is highly recommended to history buffs and to anyone who likes a great story.

Awesome New Addition to Our Speakers Bureau!

 and area of current expertise is the War of 1812, but he is now working on two other novels … one a sequel to his current book, and the other a prequel that tells the story of one of his key character’s experiences in the French and Indian War and the Revolutionary War.

Mr. Price will be an excellent advocate for the SAR and our local chapter!

For more information about Eddie, you can visit his website, or “Like him on Facebook”. To see if he will be speaking at an event near you, check his regularly updated speaking schedule.

Visit the Colonel Stephen Trigg SAR  website that this review is taken from.

Eddie Price's award-winning historical novel "Widder's Landing",
will soon be going into a fourth printing at Acclaim Press

Sunday, 01 June 2014 

On June 21st, 2014 Price will present his new program, "What I Saw at Cane Ridge" at the Cane Ridge Meetinghouse in Bourbon County, Kentucky

Widder's Landing deals with early Kentucky farm life, river trade, cabin raising, romance, politics, war, (the War of 1812) natural phenomena, (the Great Comet of 1811, an eclipse, the largest-ever documented passenger pigeon flight and the New Madrid Earthquakes--and frontier religion. In the story Price modeled a "brush arbor" sermon on the Cane Ridge Revival of 1801. Readers began asking--"Were the revivals really like that?" They are still asking.

Reviews for Eddie Price’s Children Book - Little Miss Grubby Toes Gets Lost