Kentucky's Appalachian Highlands (circa. 1930's) is a world where habits and customs often bewilder: where the ties of kinship and ancestry hold to unswerving lines, where moonshiners leave incipient trails and the strains of hard times too often coalesce into the empty-eyed face of hardscrabble. It's where Bobby Yonts and Rubin Cain (as good as brothers) come of age and test the limits of things new and out of bounds. But it's the odious hand of...