Blunt, essential reading on today's Appalachia that is less elegiac and more forward-thinking than most.
A collection of on-the-ground reporting from one of the country’s most misunderstood and misrepresented regions.
Before the 2016 election, Donald Trump promised Appalachians that the coal-mining industry would come roaring back; since then, it remains on life support thanks to competing energy sources hammering a business that, for its workers, is economically and literally toxic. In Hillbilly Elegy (2016), J.D. Vance blamed the region’s woes on lack of initiative among its residents, but a host of unique pressures trap the area in poverty. Such clarity comes thanks to the reporting of Ohio Valley ReSource, a media collective launched in 2016 by seven public media outlets in Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia. This book, drawn from the collective’s reporting and overseen by Young, its managing editor, shows how mining companies have dodged taxes and fines while polluting the region and eluding blame for the illnesses their practices have caused; how exploitative pharmaceutical companies bred the opioid epidemic; and how efforts to launch retraining and revitalization programs tend to disappoint: “How do you bring in people and businesses if you can’t promise them a clean glass of water?” one story concludes. But while the articles paint stark portraits of the region’s troubles, the reporting team doesn’t indulge in ruin-porn clichés about the region; rather, they deliver profiles of people shouldering ahead despite governmental and corporate missteps—e.g., farmers making an uneasy transition into hemp farming and activist efforts to better hold mining companies accountable. The reporting doesn’t aspire to flashy style or epic sweep—the articles are modeled after Sunday-newspaper features—the plainspoken reporting grabs the attention. Bemoaning the newfound emphasis on fracking, one man laments: “I don’t understand why fossil fuel extraction is the only kind of job this area is offered. We want jobs that won’t kill us.”
Blunt, essential reading on today's Appalachia that is less elegiac and more forward-thinking than most.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982148-86-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Tiller Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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