A minister serving the mountain people of West Virginia for 13 years, Jack Weller set about to write the book that he himself needed and could not find when he first realized that he and his co-workers were accomplishing very little because they were unwittingly attempting ""to impose our own cultural assumptions on a people who did not share them."" It is a basic study in contemporary social history, reads lucidly and comes at a time when national interest is focussed on the region and its problems.