If ever a book exemplified "the good, the bad, and the ugly," this is it.

This is really three short works in one: Benjamin Craven's "The Story of Naomi Wise," "The History of Randleman, N.C." -- and two dozen pages of ads at the end that presumably were sold to pay for the printing of the book.

The ads are the "ugly" part of the book -- the sort of ads that you saw around the 1950s, mostly set entirely in type, without graphics, and often consisting just of a business name and address. For those who remember Yellow Pages, that's about what it looks like; the ads don't go together either in contents or in looks. As an historical artifact, it has some interest, but given that the phone numbers are generally four digits (yes, it's that old -- they're numbers on the Randleman local exchange), they won't do you too much good.

The "bad" is the opening piece, "The Story of Naomi Wise." Naomi Wise was a young woman who was drowned in the Deep River (which runs through modern Randleman) in 1807. Benjamin Craven wrote an account of her murder some decades later. Unfortunately, it's all but pure fiction. Yes, there was a murder victim named Naomi Wise, killed by John Lewis because she was pregnant with his baby. But the account is so bad that it doesn't even get her death date right (he says she died in 1808). He also described her as a 19-year-old -- which is quite a trick, given that she already had two illegitimate children, and the older one of them was nine years old. Craven did not actually tell the story of Naomi Wise, and very likely didn't know it (to this day, we know very little about her except for the paperwork about her children and the fact of her murder); he created a standard fill-in-the-blank murder story and stuck the name of Naomi in the blanks. Frankly, Craven's account is so overblown that it made me feel slightly ill. How could anyone swallow this nonsense? The sole significance of Craven's account is that it includes the first printed version of the song of "Poor Omie" or "Naomi Wise," one of the most popular of all North Carolina folksongs (and the only reason to acquire this book).

So the only "good" part of this is the History of Randleman. This is more of a gazetteer than a continuous history, which isn't surprising because, other than the murder of Naomi Wise which took place before Randleman had even acquired its name, not much seems to have happened there! So it's probably an utter bore for people outside Randleman -- but for a local interested in the history and description of the town as it was in 1944, it is surely an invaluable reference.

So there are two audiences for this book: Inhabitants of Randleman and those who want to learn all the (mostly false) folklore about Naomi Wise. And even those who are interested in the latter should be aware that it's surrounded by complete nonsense. ( )