Review by Choice Review
Allium tricoccum (ramps, wild leeks) is an important food source for the inhabitants of Appalachia, as it appears after the previous year's supplies are exhausted and before the new harvest. These same Appalachians went from being independent homesteaders to landless hillbillies; Daniel Boone fits both images, as he lost nearly all the land he claimed. Those early European squatters occupied the land, subsisting on the little they grew, the animals they raised, and the bounty, including ramps, of the regenerating forests. As with the earlier enclosure movement in Great Britain, the Second Industrial Revolution in the US created capital and a cash economy that divided the population into haves (speculators and capitalists) and have-nots (squatters). The former clear-cut the forests and degraded the land and water through coal mining that turned independent subsistence farmers into impoverished, dependent wage laborers. Using this regional analysis focusing on how capitalism destroyed the Appalachians' livelihood and way of life, Stoll (history, Fordham Univ.) examines life changes globally. He concludes his beautifully written analysis by asking, "Who is served by development and what is its relationship to capital?" A must read. Summing Up: Essential. All public and academic levels/libraries. --Duncan R. Jamieson, Ashland University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
BUNK: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, by Kevin Young. (Graywolf, $30.) Young's enthralling, essential history is unapologetically subjective - and timely. Again and again, he plumbs the undercurrents of a hoax to discover fearfulness and racism lurking inside. A BOLD AND DANGEROUS FAMILY: The Remarkable Story of an Italian Mother, Her Two Sons, and Their Fight Against Fascism, by Caroline Moorehead. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) This portrait of a renowned family of Italian anti-fascists, the Rossellis of Florence, depicts the ethical imperative and repercussions of dissent. The book revolves around two brothers whose resistance efforts ended only when they were murdered in 1937, in France. THE RIVER OF CONSCIOUSNESS, by Oliver Sacks. (Knopf, $27.) In this last, posthumous collection of essays, Sacks brilliantly delves into his favorite themes: the evolution of life, the workings of memory and the nature of creativity. THE ODYSSEY, by Homer. Translated by Emily Wilson. (Norton, $39.95.) This landmark translation matches the original's line count while drawing on a spare, simple and direct idiom that strips away formulaic language to let the characters take center stage. ENDURANCE: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery, by Scott Kelly. (Knopf, $29.95.) In this charming if occasionally convoluted memoir, Kelly details the endless dedication that led to his groundbreaking 12 months in space. He pulls back the curtain separating the myth of the astronaut from its human realities. RAMP HOLLOW: The Ordeal of Appalachia, by Steven Stoll. (Hill & Wang, $30.) Stoll's thesis is built around the concept of dispossession among the people of Appalachia. While the book is meticulously researched, it is also light and readable. Its great strength is that it acknowledges something our politics often fails to: that not everyone wants the same things. THE SECOND COMING OF THE KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition, by Linda Gordon. (Liveright, $27.95.) In an enlightening study troubling for its contemporary relevance, Gordon says "the K.K.K. may actually have enunciated values with which a majority of 1920s Americans agreed." FREYA, by Anthony Quinn. (Europa, paper, $19.) The journalist heroine of Quinn's novel is both headstrong and ambitious. Neither will be assets in post-World War II Britain. THE RELIVE BOX: And Other Stories, by T. Coraghessan Boyle. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $25.99.) Set in a close alternate reality, Boyle's skewed stories feel as if they're coming from the end of the world, from a time when we will finally be unable to live with what we are and what we have and what we have done. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 29, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
Often cited as an example of poverty and societal dysfunction, as in J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy (2016), Appalachia, for Stoll (The Great Delusion, 2008), has also meant resistance and freedom from centralized government for the people who, since the nation's earliest days, sought sanctuary in its rugged uplands. Forests and the meadowed hollows between mountains provided basic sustenance for cabin-building, cattle-grazing, bear-hunting households, and locally made whiskey had better exchange value than currency from far-off banks. But homesteaders could not long evade the growing nation's appetite for coal, timber, and tax revenue. Maps drawn to guide Civil War armies were repurposed by industrialists seeking land they could excavate or clear-cut. Subsistence farming gave way to subsistence wages in mines and factories and dependency on the very industries that had pushed settlers off their land. To truly understand Appalachian poverty, suggests Stoll, we must start with this large-scale dispossession. Offering a vast contextual woodland in which to explore life in this storied region, Stoll has created a feisty critique of capitalist land use and a rambling and provocative history.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Reviewed by Sarah Jones Appalachia is many things, depending on whom you ask. Observers have at various points christened it the other America, the land outside time, and, more recently, Trump country. But for many of us, it is simply home, and we don't recognize much of it from its media portrayals. We know it as an uneasy and lovely place, shaped by addiction and ecological degradation and a history of open class war. But these complications rarely make it into media coverage. Appalachia seems to matter little to outsiders unless it is an election year or time for one of Remote Area Medical's free clinics, when photographers and journalists who otherwise never step foot in the area swarm to document the spectacle of its poverty. J.D. Vance's popular Hillbilly Elegy only reinforced this image of Appalachia as a dysfunctional place, doomed by its own bloody intransigence. But poverty is not a cultural problem, in Appalachia and elsewhere. It is a problem of power, defined by who has it and who does not. Stoll (The Great Delusion), a professor of history at Fordham University, examines this issue exhaustively, fixing a genealogy of Appalachian poverty that places the problem in its proper political and historical context. Stoll identifies it, correctly, as a consequence of dispossession. By giving it a distinct pedigree, he helps readers understand why Appalachia became poor and why it has stayed that way for so long. "The way back to Appalachia leads through the history of capitalism in Great Britain," Stoll writes. Capitalism is the specter haunting Appalachia. Stoll focuses specifically on the practice of enclosure, employed first by England's feudal lords to establish the concept of private property. Victorian England's moralists favored the practice and, later, so did American tycoons and corporations, who used it to gain access to Appalachia's natural resources. The region's coal and timber made it valuable. Now the free market is moving on, leaving an exsanguinated corpse behind. Stoll is not the first academic to attribute Appalachian poverty to the influence of external forces. But his work is distinct in its emphasis on the practice of enclosure and his decision to connect Appalachia's dispossession to the material dispossessions whites inflicted on freed slaves and that empires and transnational conglomerates later inflicted on colonial and postcolonial nations. Though Appalachia's "development" lacks the racialized aspect present in the latter two examples, a thread connects each: the idea that capitalism is a civilizing force. Stoll's is an academic work, but that should not deter readers. He is an appealing writer. The book's most significant flaw occurs late in its final third, when he veers sharply from analysis to commentary. Even so, it is a minor issue. Stoll's insights on how Appalachia became what it is today are an important corrective to flawed commentary about a much-maligned place. (Nov.) Sarah Jones is a staff writer for the New Republic, where she covers politics and culture. © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Stoll (Fordham Univ., The Great Delusion) examines the journey of the residents of the southern Appalachian mountain region, from subsistence farmers to employees of mills and coal mines, who lost their land and their autonomy in the process. The author also looks at the story of Appalachia in the context of the larger histories of labor and industrialization, and presents a broad history of capitalism and dispossession, beginning with the enclosure of common land in England in the 18th century. In a wide-ranging narrative, this chronicle touches on many aspects of the region, including the Whiskey Rebellion, the founding of West Virginia, and even the origins of the feud between the Hatfields and McCoys. Stoll closes with a recommendation, presenting a proposal for "Commons Communities" as a way of restoring areas ravaged by coal mining through communal farming and governance. This is not a regional history. Rather, Stoll uses selected examples from Appalachia's past to argue that the move from subsistence farming to wage work is one from independence to dependence, bringing not progress but despair. VERDICT Recommended for readers interested in U.S. economic history or the history of labor.-Nicholas Graham, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A searching economic and political history of a dispossessed, impoverished Appalachia that progress has long eluded.Alexis de Tocqueville may have insisted that there are no peasants in America, but Stoll (History/Fordham Univ.; The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth, 2008, etc.) finds the term "a perfectly good word to describe a country person." Moreover, as refugees from the enclosures of feudal and early modern Europe, the free "peasants" of Appalachia were able to find landeven if seized from othersand channel their own energies into whatever work they saw fit. That was early on, however. Following the incursions of the extractive industries of logging and mining, those free people suddenly were landless, essentially the property of the company. Stoll notes that the story of Appalachia is very much the story of world systems, with the region "fully part of an Atlantic and global expansion of capitalism." In that winner-take-all system, places like the titular Ramp Hollow, a hamlet outside of Morgantown, West Virginia, that hosted a once-profitable coal seam, are used up and then abandoned. So are their people, as the log cabins of mountain dwellers gave way to tar-paper shanties, "just as a free and robust set of subsistence practices gave way to impoverishing wage labor." Stoll's resonant critique of capitalism takes many turns, examining the corn economy here and the money economy there as well as the backyard company-town garden as a free ride for the company, the rise and fall of agrarianism, and many other topics. The author closes with a friendly but pointed critique of J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy as blaming the victim for systemic failures, even as dispossession has served others "as an instrument of control, not a sign of progress." Which is better, cornfields or clean coal? Stoll's sharp book complicates our understanding of a much-misunderstood, much-maligned region that deserves better than it has received. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
