(For a firsthand account of life in Appalachian Kentucky, see Linda Scott DeRosier, Creeker.)
With rural poverty remaining a persistent problem in the US, sociologists Billings (Univ. of Kentucky; Planters and the Making of a “New South,” not reviewed) and Blee (Univ. of Pittsburgh; Women of the Klan, not reviewed) offer an ambitious history of an Appalachian county in order to understand “how places grow poor.”
“Culture-of-poverty” theory explains Appalachian economic backwardness as a result of cultural backwardness; “internal colonialism” views Appalachia as a region exploited for its natural resources, especially coal, by outside economic forces. While acknowledging the merits of both approaches and utilizing them, the authors also find both wanting in that Appalachia is presented as a place without a history. Yet how did a culture of poverty develop; what made it possible for Appalachia to become an internal colony? To answer these questions, Billings and Blee develop a remarkably detailed history of an impoverished county in Appalachian Kentucky from 1850 to 1910. Building on the research of James S. Brown and using everything from census records to court documents, the authors show how economics, culture, and politics interacted to create patterns of poverty that persist to this day. Early industrialization based on slave labor allowed for the creation in the county of a powerful elite whose influence was maintained through labyrinthine kinship ties and through the hegemonic control of local politics. Most of the rest of the white population engaged in subsistence farming, which became ever more precarious as population pressure came to bear on a limited amount of land. Here, too, kinship ties developed as means of survival and at times resistance to elite domination. Too often, however, elite dominance kept the poor in a dependent situation. Feuds, for instance, usually thought of as typically backward Appalachian behavior, were actually elite conflicts in which the poor were enlisted to fight. In brief, then, the complex and dynamic interaction of diverse forces prepared Appalachia for chronic poverty long before the present era. Skilled history from which interested readers and policy makers can learn much.
(For a firsthand account of life in Appalachian Kentucky, see Linda Scott DeRosier, Creeker.)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-521-65229-4
Page Count: 520
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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