"The Miracle of Brasstown Valley"
Zell Miller's new book to be released in August

Zell Miller has a new book coming out and it's not about politics. Entitled "The Miracle of Brasstown Valley," it will remind some older readers of his first book over thirty years ago, "The Mountains Within Me."

The new book is the story of the miraculous creation of a college in remote Brasstown Valley at the turn of the 19th Century and the captivating characters who Miller relates "with the Grace of God made it happen." There is the Methodist circuit rider still in his 20s who came into Brasstown Valley in 1885 on a mule, "bringing only a dream and the fierce faith of an Old Testament prophet." There is the "wise, resourceful, softspoken widow who breathed life into the infant school not once but twice." There is the man Young Harris himself, a wealthy Methodist layman whose generosity for Christian education was so great that his kin sued him because they felt left out. And the dynamic Joseph A. Sharp, who became the college president in 1899. Miller describes Sharp as a "Shakespearean scholar, who was more at home on the college farm with his britches folled up and his shirt tail flapping."

Milleris quick to point out that the book is more than just about the birth of Young Harris College. While that is the story line of the book, it is much more than that, he says. "I also write about that mystical valley, Choestoe 'where the rabbits dance' in Union County, where, even in the 1880s, education was exalted.

I write of these oldest mountains in the world where the nation's first 'gold rush' occurred, where the fasinating Cherokees lived and suffered a terrible tragedy. And I write of the shrewd, spunky and spirited settlers of this once isolated frontier and their vanishing ways."

The book should be at bookstores and on Amazon.com in early August. It is published by Stroud and Hall, the Macon, Georgia company that published Miller's last two books which were national bestsellers. "This is a regional book, limited and narrow in scope," Miller explained. "I expect no great broad interest in it. But it's a story that I've been waiting to tell for a long time."

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