FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Born a city girl, Jane Alexander was tugged from a vibrant, culture-laden metropolitan life to a primitive woods camp in the Smoky Mountains of North
Carolina. There on a little flat surrounded by towering oaks and hemlocks she spent six-weeks every summer with her husband Tom and their two small children building a simple, old-timey log cabin with proper dovetail joints, mud chinking and hand-built stairs. With no roof over her head, no plumbing, no electricity she eventually got into the rhythm of rustic living and the wilderness became part of her soul.
Hiking the Smokies, the Blue Ridge and beyond she came to know more about the native Smoky Mountain plants than many of the locals. In her spare time she learned to cane chairs, to weave, to paint and to make haunting photographs of the gorgeous mountains around her.
This came after a successful career as a journalist in New York and Washington.
One of the few women of her era to hold a professional job, she rose to become senior editor at Time Life Books and Science 80-86 .
Son Ames and daughter Amanda who contribute to this memoir hope it will illuminate their father’s insatiable curiosity, stick-to-it-iveness, and his drive to ask, “Why?” Their mother, they note, did not have the luxury to ask such questions since she was kept busy trying to maintain a career and a family while her shelter was either being demolished or expanded, depending on Tom’s fickle moods.

Jane Alexander, an experienced journalist and editor, grew up in Utica and Cold
Spring Harbor, New York and graduated from Smith College. After several years at Life , where she and Tom met, she joined the staff of Time-Life Books and was editor of the Nature Science Annual for eight years. Later she joined the staff of
Science 80 magazine as a senior editor. Retiring in the late 1980s she and her husband Tom, also an experienced journalist, moved back to Tom’s childhood home, the Cataloochee Ranch, to a log house they hewed from timber on the property.
The book is a 310 page quarto, soft cover with flaps, illustrated throughout with
374 photographs, 55 in color. Historical pictures come from family albums and the
Cataloochee Ranch Collection. Cover image is by Bill Harbin, Rome, Georgia.
Book design is by Susan Rhew Design, Asheville, North Carolina.
What Jane Alexander has accomplished in this collection of family stories is astonishingly honest, yet generous. Read this book. Like the view Jane describes from Tom’s Stand, “It’s good for the soul.”
– Helen Wallace, author of Shimming the Glass House
The View from Tom’s Stand is remarkable.
– Gwenda Ledbetter, storyteller and playwright
Warmly and lovingly, Jane Alexander and her friends tell the story of their corner of the Smoky Mountains and the life she and her husband Tom Alexander made for themselves there.

– Robert Kanigel, author of
The Man Who Knew Infinity
In capturing through words and photographs a life well-lived, Jane Alexander opens the inner existence of a never-ending deep romance with her amazing husband Tom.
– Bill Gradison, member of Congress and Cincinnati mayor
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Book website: www.tomsstand.com
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Media contact:
Jane Alexander