Anthony Harkins
Auteur de Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy
A propos de l'auteur
Anthony Harkins is a professor of history at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where he teaches courses in popular culture and twentieth-century United States history and American studies. He is the author of Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon. Meredith afficher plus McCabroll is the director of writing and rhetoric at Bowdoin College, where she teaches courses in writing, American literature, and film. She is the author of Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film. afficher moins
Œuvres de Anthony Harkins
Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy (2019) — Directeur de publication — 118 exemplaires
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
Membres
Critiques
Listes
Prix et récompenses
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Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 2
- Membres
- 189
- Popularité
- #115,306
- Évaluation
- 3.2
- Critiques
- 3
- ISBN
- 10
From the Protestant Work Ethic to the Prosperity Gospel, the god everyone worships is wealth and the greatest sin is poverty. America’s civic religion is Horation Algerism. This makes it very profitable to comfort the comfortable by telling them they need not feel compassion for those who struggle because it’s their own fault, their bad choices, their addiction to drugs, their failure to get a good job, and their cultural poverty. We hear it again with every generation and Vance hit a sweet spot just in time. We who are on the left and right can have smug contempt for Trump voters because they are uneducated, racist, lazy, hillbillies on opioids. According to R. C. Hutton points out “the book is aimed not at that underclass (few books are), but rather at a middle- and upper-class readership more than happy to learn that white American poverty has nothing to do with them or with any structural problems in American economy and society and everything to do with poor white folks’ inherent vices.” Yup.
Appalachian Reckoning restores the variety, vitality, and value of the people of Appalachia. The book includes several poems and photos and personal essays recounting the richness of that culture. The people of Appalachia are not culturally deficient. How much of our cultural heritage is sourced in those mountains? These are people who dared strike against the coal barons, whose Peabody coal strike is memorialized in song and film, and whose culture has fostered the Foxfire Magazine and book series (My parents had all the books.) Country music would not exist without its Appalachian origins.
I recommend reading Appalachian Reckoning in small bites rather than all at once because a collection of articles and essays critiquing one book naturally becomes a bit repetitive. How many ways can you say that Hillbilly Elegy works as a memoir, but as sociology, it fails? Nonetheless, I hope every person who read the original book would read this rebuttal because this book sees the humanity and complexity of a region and does not do the disservice of telling people whose jobs have been erased, whose land and rivers have been poisoned, and who are in despair that they problems they have are because they are weak, lazy, and ignorant.
Appalachian Reckoning will be released on March 1st. I received a copy of Appalachian Reckoning from the publisher through NetGalley.
Appalachian Reckoning at West Virginia University Press
Anthony Harkins faculty page
Meredith McCarroll Chronicle Vitae
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2019/02/23/9781946684806/… (plus d'informations)