Summary

Community leadership development programs are designed to increase the capacity of citizens for civic engagement. These programs fill gaps in what people know about governance and the processes of governance, especially at the local level. The work of many in this field is a response to the recognition that in smaller, rural communities, disadvantaged neighborhoods, or disaster areas, the skills and aptitudes needed for citizens to be successful leaders are often missing or underdeveloped.

Community Effects of Leadership Development Education presents the results of a five-year study tracking community-level effects of community leadership development programs drawn from research conducted in Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, South Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia. 

As the first book of its kind to seek answers to the question of whether or not the millions of dollars invested each year in community leadership development programs are valuable in the real world, this book challenges researchers, community organizers, and citizens to identify improved ways of demonstrating the link from program to implementation, as well as the way in which programs are conceived and designed.

This text also explores how leadership development programs relate to civic engagement, power and empowerment, and community change, and it demonstrates that community leadership development programs really do produce community change. At the same time, the findings of this study strongly support a relational view of community leadership, as opposed to other traditional leadership models used for program design.

To complement their findings, the authors have developed CENCE, a new model for community leadership development programs, which links leadership development efforts to community development by understanding how Civic Engagement, Networks, Commitment, and Empowerment work together to produce community viability.

Contents

Coming Soon.    

Author

Kenneth Pigg has been helping community leaders become more effective change agents in their community for over forty years as a specialist with the Cooperative Extension Service in Kentucky and Missouri and has served on a number of national panels and projects dealing with community change and leadership. 

Ken Martin is Chair of the Department of Extension and Associate Director, Programs for Ohio State University Extension.  

Stephen P. Gasteyer is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Michigan State University. 

Godwin T. Apaliyah is the The Ohio State University Extension’s Community Development Educator, and the Director of Economic Development, Fayette County. 

Kari Keating is a Teaching Associate in Agricultural Leadership Education at the University of Illinois.

Reviews

Coming Soon.

Summary

In Magnetic North an aging warrior and his best friend—perhaps his only friend—ride motorcycles to Alaska, with the ultimate goal of riding to the Arctic Circle. It is a ride that mirrors their lives, a ride that causes old stories, old trials, old darkness to come, once again, through the spinning wheels of the machines they are riding.

Morgan is a man who can't give it up. His propensity toward violence has followed him through all the days of his life, and it follows him now.

Slade has shared much of Morgan's life, and he has been the one of the rare stabilizing factors in that life. Without Slade, it is clear that Morgan has no guidance, no goals, and no potential for living much longer than his next encounter with . . . almost anything.

And so the two old friends ride out from New Mexico and Colorado—heading north.

Contents

Coming Soon.    

Author

Lee Maynard was born and raised deep in the mountains of West Virginia, a location that drives the emotion and grit of most of his writing. He says he has never had a “career.” Rather, he sought out “day jobs” while doing his real job—writing. Among several other things, he has been a criminal investigator, college president, and COO of a national experiential education organization. He now lives and writes at the edge of an Indian reservation in the high desert of New Mexico. He is the author of The Pale Light of Sunset: Scattershots and Hallucinations in an Imagined Life and the Crum trilogy: Crum, Screaming with the Cannibals, and The Scummers.

Reviews

"It is part action-adventure novel, part off-road motorcycling memoir, part philosophical meditation about the nature of danger and courage, about love, both lost and found, about  friendship & trust, about aging and death, about the pure pleasure of revenge. This is a spooky, beautiful dream of a novel."
Chuck Kinder, author of Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale and Last Mountain Dancer: Hard-Earned Lessons in Love, Loss, and Honky-Tonk Outlaw Life

"Once 'on the road,' Maynard's characters make us want to follow them as far North as their endurance will take us."
Gary Fincke, author of The Proper Words for Sin and A Room of Rain

"It is a rollicking contemporary picaresque—a tale of friendship and adventure and a personal quest for meaning. If Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance had been written by Edward Abbey, it would be Lee Maynard’s Magnetic North."
Doug Van Gundy, author of A Life Above Water

Summary

Cinco Becknell is the story of a homeless man with no memory. Locked in the emptiness of his mind is a secret, a past, which will either keep him alive or get him killed. 

As Cinco staggers through a dangerous journey of rediscovery, he is hunted by psychopaths who want to kill him, and he has no idea why; he is shadowed by a woman who may keep him alive—or not; and he is finally helped by another woman who can bring back to him the light he looks for—if he can stay alive. But he is running out of time, and people around him are dying, always violently. 

Gradually, he begins to understand the true, brutal, nature of himself and of the darkness of his past. But it is a past, and a present, that he may never fully understand. 

This novel, based on generations of violent, local family history, is set in the underbelly of the pseudo-glitzy streets of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Contents

Coming Soon.    

Author

Lee Maynard was born and raised deep in the mountains of West Virginia, a location that drives the emotion and grit of most of his writing. He says he has never had a “career.” Rather, he sought out “day jobs” while doing his real job—writing. Among several other things, he has been a criminal investigator, college president, and COO of a national experiential education organization. He now lives and writes at the edge of an Indian reservation in the high desert of New Mexico. He is the author of The Pale Light of Sunset: Scattershots and Hallucinations in an Imagined Life and the Crum trilogy: Crum, Screaming with the Cannibals, and The Scummers.

Lee Maynard would like to thank Arlo Chan, editor/concept editor, for his help in developing this book.

Reviews

"A fictional mélange that's part thriller and part social commentary, set against the beautiful scenic backdrop of the southwest—and it works. Maynard begins with a timeline of 400-plus years of historical and fictional Santa Fe, New Mexico. William Becknell blazed the original ruts of the Santa Fe Trail in 1821—history. Cinco Becknell, the fifth William, is homeless on the streets of Santa Fe in current time—fiction. He wakes up in El Paso and has no memory of who he is or why he's there. He uses a bus ticket to Santa Fe from his shirt pocket to illuminate the flashbacks he's having of torture, pain and the old scars on his body. Little Jimmy befriends him on the streets and teaches the tricks of survival—how to get food, where to sleep, how to move through the city like a ghost. Jimmy names him Stick, the only name Cinco knows, and they both run from two psychopaths who need to silence Jimmy, who saw them brutally dispose of a woman in the desert night. There's also another person shadowing Cinco's movements—an elegant, mysterious, lethal black woman who calls him Pyat and is a connection to some dark pieces of a Russian memory. A lovely woman from Cinco's teenage past, Elena, sister of one of three boys whose photograph hangs in her gallery, begins to see the Cinco she knew from the photo in this beaten shadow of a stick man, and a love story sneaks into the action. Maynard is a consummate storyteller, and the thriller elements run parallel to the tough life of the homeless on the streets of The City Different."
Kirkus Reviews
 

Summary

The narratives throughout Gary Fincke’s sixth collection of short stories contain newsworthy events that are chronicled secondhand: the shooting of a policeman, the murder of a house flipper, the firing of a teacher for punching a violent student, the accidental drowning of a gay man in a flood, and a fire somewhat accidently set by a juvenile smoker in a school.

Despite these surprising events, the narrator of each story is an ordinary person caught up in the action but preoccupied by other things, whether zombie movies, collecting unusual words, the oddity of other people’s sexual habits, or what to do in retirement. 

These shocking incidents become both central and peripheral to the narrative, as Fincke portrays the fluctuating emotions and self-protective reflections of fathers, sons, and husbands, creating a world where individuals rarely understand each other, yet still arrive at moments of compassion, tolerance, perseverance, and familial love.

Contents

Coming Soon.    

Author

Gary Fincke is the Charles Degenstein Professor of English and Creative Writing at Susquehanna University. Winner of the 2003 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the 2003 The Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry, and the 2010 Stephen F. Austin Poetry Prize for recent collections. He has published twenty-seven books of short fiction, poetry, and nonfiction as well as the novel How Blasphemy Sounds to God. He is the author of The Proper Words for Sin, a finalist for the 2014 Paterson Fiction Prize.

Reviews

"A Room of Rain is a group of seamless short stories, by an old master of the form.  Gary Fincke has never hesitated to ask hard questions in his work, and these stories are determined to take the toughest situations by the horns."
Madison Smartt Bell is the author of twelve novels, including the Haitian Revolutionary trilogy of All Soul's Rising, Master of the Crossroads, and The Stone That The Builder Refused

For years, Gary Fincke has quietly built a reputation as one of the nation's finest storytellers. This glorious collection shows him at the peak of his powers--funny, gritty, provocative."
Cary Holladay, author of The Deer in the Mirror

"Gary Fincke is one of the most reliable and prolific writers out there, and A Room of Rain is clearly one of his strongest collections. In this world that seems so quick to stick labels on everything, Fincke goes around ripping off all the stickers. He convincingly blurs the line between what is taboo and what is not, refusing to allow readers to back away into safety; these stories illustrate the notion that we are all have taboo thoughts, that beneath the surface, none of us are “ordinary,” none of us “pure.” At his best, he reminds me of Richard Yates—Fincke flat out knows how to write."
Jim Daniels, author of Eight Mile High and other collections

"This collection is provocative yet subtle; gritty yet humorous. The characters are round and the short stories are complete, though often feel like the tip of an iceberg. I wanted more because of how drawn I was to the characters, not because the tales left me unsatisfied. These stories continue to stick with me long after closing the book, beautifully rendered reminders of what we each hold untold."
Genevieve Shifke Ali, Independent Publisher
 

Summary

Riding on Comets is the true story of an only child growing up in a working-class family during the 1950s and ‘60s. 

As the family storyteller, Cat Pleska whispers and shouts about her life growing up around savvy, strong women and hard-working, hard-drinking men. Unlike many family stories set within Appalachia, this story provides an uncommon glimpse into this region: not coal, but an aluminum plant; not hollers, but small-town America; not hillbillies, but a hard-working family with traditional values. 

From the dinner table, to the back porch, to the sprawling countryside, Cat Pleska reveals the sometimes tender, sometimes frightening education of a child who listens at the knees of these giants. She mimics and learns every nuance, every rhythm—how they laugh, smoke, cuss, fight, love, and tell stories—as she unwittingly prepares to carry their tales forward, their words and actions forever etched in her mind. And finally, she discovers a life story of her own. 

Contents

Introduction

                        IMAGES

Chapter 1        No Salt

Chapter 2        Trick or Treat

Chapter 3        A Tone

Chapter 4        Give Me My Hat

Chapter 5        Big Earl’s

Chapter 6        A Brush with the Law

Chapter 7        In Mommaw’s Kitchen

                        AWAKENING

Chapter 8        What We Called Home

Chapter 9        From a Time Before

Chapter 10      Night Light

Chapter 11      Cicada Buzz

                        AWARENESS

Chapter 12      I Spy

Chapter 13      Shelter

Chapter 14      Back Home

Chapter 15      Devil Faces

Chapter 16      Something Gathers ‘Round Me

Chapter 17      House of Leaves

Chapter 18      Plunder

REACTION

Chapter 19      Alarm Clock

Chapter 20      My Civic Duty

Chapter 21      The Nervous Hospital

Chapter 22      My Kingdom for a Horse

Chapter 23      Night on Cheat Mountain I

Chapter 24      Night on Cheat Mountain II

Chapter 25      CarniVAL

Chapter 26      War

Chapter 27      The Sailor man

                        LOSS

Chapter 28      In the Cellar

Chapter 29      Reckoning

Chapter 30      Exception to the Rule

Chapter 31      Charmed

Chapter 32      I’ve Drawed up a Mite

Chapter 33      900 Degrees Celsius

Chapter 34      Twin Haloes

Chapter 35      The Phone Rings

Chapter 36      Attention K-Mart Shoppers! Do the Dead Wear Underwear?

Chapter 37      We Shall Gather

Chapter 38      Riding on Comets

Chapter 39      Night on Cheat Mountain III

Chapter 40      Fall

                        STRENGTH

Chapter 41      Liminal

Chapter 42      Dragon’s Tale

Epilogue          
 

Author

Cat Pleska is a seventh generation West Virginian, and she is a writer, editor, educator, publisher, and storyteller. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College. She is an essayist for West Virginia Public Radio and a book reviewer for the Charleston Gazette. She coedited the anthology Fed from the Blade: Tales and Poems from the Mountains. Pleska has been published in literary magazines and newspapers throughout the Appalachian region. She lives in Scott Depot, West Virginia, with her husband, Dan, one dog, four cats, and with a daughter, Katie, in nearby St. Albans. 

Reviews

“In voice, in person, on the radio, on the page, Cat Pleska has for years been one of my favorite writers. I carry the rhythms of her honeyed voice inside me. I have felt the reassurance of her grandmother’s lap on the night-porch, listening to the thump of maternal heartbeats that made Cat feel safe then and forever, and I’ve been gripped by her father’s hands, less reliable but just as beloved, driving like crazy down Cheat Mountain. Cat herself stands fearless wherever she is among the grownups, the way only a greatly loved child can stand, alone on the front seat of the truck, curious to see roosters fighting while her grandpa goes inside at the bootlegger’s. I’ve tagged along after her mother (who made her bed tight enough to bounce a dime off) and her aunt as they circle the old family homestead, remembering their own childhoods. Never patronizing or pathologizing, always with compassion, knowing that her amazing, enduring, flawed family gave her the gift of unconditional belonging, Cat Pleska tells the story of her people with steady awareness of their hardships and foibles, their greatness of heart, and the smoking or alcohol that killed some of them, cut off in the midst of their stories while their inheritor, Cat, listens and faithfully records their voices for herself, for them, and for us. I could read this writer’s words forever, and still want more."
Diana Hume George, author of The Lonely Other: A Woman Watching America

"The gifts of Cat Pleska’s Riding on Comets are many: it is fresh, candid, gently humorous, tautly lyrical, and deeply moving.Cat Pleska writes masterfully and movingly about herself, her West Virginia home, and her colorful kin. But the greatest pleasure in reading Riding on Comets is that Pleska’s prose refuses to stay on the page. Rather, it insists on being read aloud and filling the room with its rich rhythms, resonances, syntax, and family diction. Cat Pleska is a natural, graceful, spellbinding storyteller."
Lisa Knopp, What the River Carries: Encounters with the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte

“Cat Pleska’s memoir of a childhood lived among the ‘giants’ of her West Virginia family is by turns humorous, touching, and achingly beautiful. This is a storyteller who knows how to piece together shards of story into a brilliant mosaic of a life. A joy to read.”
Janice Gary is the author of Short Leash: A Memoir of Dog Walking and Deliverance, winner of two Silver 2014 Nautilus Awards and a 2014 Eric Hoffer Prize for Memoir.

“Riding on Comets is not only a personal memoir, it is the story of a family embedded in West Virginia for many generations. . . .Cat Pleska’s restrained but graceful prose allows us to witness four generations through the eyes of the author, first as a child and then through the years that followed as her people live, age, and die. The details Pleska offers have the immediacy of truths well told, with a resolute eye and spacious heart, neither shying away from family and personal dysfunction, nor sentimentalizing the bonds of fear and love that held her family together.”
Geoffrey Cameron Fuller is an author of the true crime Pretty Little Killers and the crime thriller Full Bone Moon

“This compelling memoir illumines a challenging childhood rooted in the town and countryside of West Virginia. It is an identifiably Appalachian life insightfully revealing a broader view of the region than stereotypes portray. It is, as well, pervaded with a razor-sharp honesty that brings heartfelt empathy to both the sweet and the wicked. I could not stop cheering for this spunky little girl who becomes a spirited and resourceful woman, a woman who never gives up on herself or those she loves.”
Marc Harshman, Poet Laureate of West Virginia and children’s book author

“Cat Pleska is a natural storyteller, a storied child. Growing up in West Virginia in the ‘50s and ‘60s, her life was steeped in family stories, and she was the one entrusted to retell them. Her own memories and experiences of small-town Appalachia deepen this candid and compelling coming-of-age memoir, and she captures our hearts in the process.”
Laura Treacy Bentley, author of The Silver Tattoo and Lake Effect

“Image by image, each unquestionably whole and mysterious. . . . Those images—her grandmother offering a ‘slice of apple from the edge of her knife,’ the ‘curing tobacco leaves hanging in bunches from the ceilings wooden beams’ in a long abandoned house, or her ‘Dad leaning over [her] mother's pristine, white enamel kitchen sink and throwing up blood’—tenderly sear themselves into both Cat’s heart and the reader’s.  All these images reflect, compound, and resonate with one another until they carry us forward like a leaf swirling in the October wind.”
Chris Green, Director of the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center, Berea College 

“Cat Pleska’s memoir seamlessly moves through moments in time to discover that her story is her family’s story of struggle and forgiveness against the backdrop of her native West Virginia mountains. Like stars that become constellations if we know how to look at them, this fine and engaging book shows us how to find and read the stories of our lives.”
Rob Merritt, author of The Language of Longing

“Sometimes comedic, sometimes heart wrenching . . . Cat Pleska writes with the graceful succinctness of a poet—whether she’s describing a bike ride home ‘pedaling fast against the dark’ or just listening to the peepers ‘calling out for someone to love them.’”
Cheryl Ware, author of Flea Circus Summer, Catty-Cornered, Venola in Love, Venola the Vegetarian, and Robert Price Has Head Lice

Summary

In Beowulf and the Grendel-kin: Politics and Poetry in Eleventh-Century England, Helen Damico presents the first concentrated discussion of the initiatory two-thirds of Beowulf’s 3,182 lines in the context of the sociopolitically turbulent years that composed the first half of the eleventh century in Anglo-Danish England.

Damico offers incisive arguments that major historical events and personages pertaining to the reign of Cnut and those of his sons recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Encomium Emmae Reginae, and major continental and Scandinavian historical texts, hold striking parallels with events and personages found in at least eight vexing narrative units, as recorded by Scribe A in BL, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, that make up the poem’s quasi sixth-century narrative concerning the fall of the legendary Scyldings. 

Given the poet’s compositional skill—widely relational and eclectic at its core—and his affinity with the practicing skalds, these strings of parallelisms could scarcely have been coincidental. Rather, Damico argues that examined within the context of other eleventh-century texts that either bemoaned or darkly satirized or obversely celebrated the rise of the Anglo-Danish realm, the Beowulfian units may bring forth a deeper understanding of the complexity of the poet’s compositional process.

Damico illustrates the poet’s use of the tools of his trade—compression, substitution, skillful encoding of character—to reinterpret and transform grave sociopolitical “facts” of history, to produce what may be characterized as a type of historical allegory, whereby two parallel narratives, one literal and another veiled are simultaneously operative. 

Beowulf and the Grendel-kin lays out the story of Beowulf, not as a monster narrative nor a folklorish nor solely a legendary tale, but rather as a poem of its time, a historical allegory coping with and reconfiguring sociopolitical events of the first half of eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon England.

Contents

Coming Soon.

Author

Helen Damico is Professor Emerita of English Medieval Language and Literature at the University of New Mexico, where she was twice selected as Outstanding Teacher and honored as UNM Presidential Teaching Fellow. She is a founder of its Institute for Medieval Studies, a recipient of the New Mexico Humanities Award for Lifetime Contributions to the Humanities, and a member of The Medieval Academy of America and recipient of its CARA Award for Outstanding Service to Medieval Studies. She is also an Honorary Member of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists. She edited the three volumes of Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Essays in the Formation of a Discipline and is the author of Beowulf’s Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition.

Reviews

"Debate about the dating of Beowulf has raged among scholars for many years, and it shows no sign of abating. The suggestion advanced here, with control, commitment, and clarity, is that the poem incorporates passages that can be read as allegories or reflexes of the period beginning with the Viking raids on England in the late tenth century, leading to the Danish conquest in 1016, and, following Cnut’s death in 1035, to the emergence of Queen Emma in a role that animates the joint and separate reigns of Harald Harefoot and Harthacnut. To say any more would be to spoil the ride. . ."
Simon Keynes, Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, University of Cambridge

“Damico makes an elegant and thought-provoking case for Beowulf as a political allegory of late Anglo-Saxon England. She weaves a subtle argument for her provocative thesis, and in doing so she illuminates not only the poem but the eleventh-century world of Cnut, Emma, and their offspring, the original audience for Beowulf and perhaps its hidden subject.”
R. M. Liuzza, University of Toronto

“Although paleographers have always included the early eleventh century in dating the script of the Beowulf manuscript, historians and literary scholars have studiously neglected this period in their otherwise wide-ranging theories on the composition of Beowulf.  Now Helen Damico has bravely ventured forth with the first book-length study of how the historical context of the manuscript might have influenced the making of the epic poem.  Thoroughly researched and cogently argued, Damico's revolutionary thesis and supporting documents demand the attention of all serious students of Beowulf.”
Kevin Kiernan, author of Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript, The Thorkelin Transcripts of Beowulf, Electronic Beowulf and Professor Emeritus, University of Kentucky

“Damico demonstrates that historical allegory need not be a passively reflexive or coyly cryptic mode of poetic invention, but can also serve as an imaginative technique of active political thought and critical analysis.”
Craig R. Davis,Professor of English Language & Literature and Comparative Literature, Smith College

Summary

This fourth Rural Sociological Society decennial volume provides advanced policy scholarship on rural North America during the 2010’s, closely reflecting upon the increasingly global nature of social, cultural, and economic forces and the impact of neoliberal ideology upon policy, politics, and power in rural areas.

The chapters in this volume represent the expertise of an influential group of scholars in rural sociology and related social sciences. Its five sections address the changing structure of North American agriculture, natural resources and the environment, demographics, diversity, and quality of life in rural communities.

Contents

Preface

Rural America in a Globalizing World:  Introduction and Overview

Conner Bailey, Leif Jensen & Elizabeth Ransom

Part I Changing Structure of Agriculture

Agriculture and Food in the 2010s, Alessandro Bonanno

1. Economic Concentration in the Agrifood System: Impacts on Rural Communities and Emerging Responses

Douglas H. Constance, Mary Hendrickson, Philip H. Howard, William D. Heffernan

2. The Declining Middle of American Agriculture: A Spatial Phenomenon

Amy Guptill and Rick Welsh

3. Land Ownership in American Agriculture

Douglas Jackson-Smith and Peggy Petrzelka

4. Mexican-born Farmworkers in U.S. Agriculture

Eric B. Jensen

5. Agricultural Technologies and the Structure of the North American Agrifood System

Leland L. Glenna and Christopher R. Henke

6. Food Safety and Governance of the Agrifood System

Michelle R. Worosz and Diana Stewart

7. Changing Animal Agriculture and the Issue of Farm Animal Welfare

Jeff Sharp and Dani Deemer

8. Agrifood Movements: Diversity, Aims, and Limits

Clare Hinrichs and John Eshleman

Part II Natural Resources and the Environment

Connections: The Next Decade of Rural Sociological Research on Natural Resources and the Environment, Louise Fortmann, Merrill Baker-Médard and Alice Kelly

9. Impacts of Climate Change on People and Communities of Rural America

Lois Wright Morton and Tom Rudel

10. Contemporary Water Issues in Rural North America

Courtney G. Flint and Naomi Krogman

11. Resource Dependency in Rural America: Continuities and Change

Richard S. Krannich, Brian Gentry, A.E. Luloff, and Peter G. Robinson

12. The Gulf: America’s Third Coast

Robert Gramling and Shirley Laska

13. Biofuels and Rural Communities: Promises, Pitfalls and Uneven Social and Environmental Impacts

Theresa Selfa and Carmen Bain

14. New Natural Gas Development and Rural Communities: Key Issues and Research Priorities

Abby Kinchy, Simona Perry, Danielle Rhubart, Richard Stedman, Kathryn Brasier, and Jeffrey Jacquet

15. Got Coal? The High Cost of Coal on Mining-Dependent Communities in Appalachia and the West

Suzanne E. Tallichet

Part III Population Change in Rural North America

Rural Population Change in Social Context, David L. Brown

16. Demographic Trends in Nonmetropolitan America: 2000 to 2010

Kenneth M. Johnson

17. Population Shifts Across U.S. Nonmetropolitan Regions

John Cromartie and Timothy S. Parker

18. Rural Families and Households and the Decline of Traditional Structure

Jessica A. Carson and Marybeth J. Mattingly

19. Children and Youth in Rural America

Diane K. McLaughlin and Carla Shoff

20. Concentrations of the Elderly in Rural America: Patterns, Processes and Outcomes in a Neoliberal World

Peter B. Nelson

21. New Rural Immigrant Destinations: Research for the 2010s

Martha Crowley and Kim Ebert

Part IV Diversity in Rural America

Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Class, and Sexuality in Rural America, Carolyn Sachs

22. The Status of African Americans in the Rural United States

John J. Green

23. Hispanic Immigration, Global Competition, and the Dairy Industry in Rural Communities

J.D. Wulfhorst, Priscilla Salant, Leigh A. Bernacchi, Stephanie L. Kane, Philip Watson, and Erinn Cruz

24. Native Nations in a Changing Global Economy

Sarah Dewees

25. The Past is the Present: Gender and the Status of Rural Women

Cynthia B. Struthers

26. Rolling in the Hay: The Rural as Sexual Space

Julie C. Keller and Michael M. Bell

27. Rural Poverty: The Great Recession, Rising Unemployment, and the Underutilized Safety Net

Jennifer Sherman

Part V Rural Economies, Community, and Quality of Life

Economic Change, Structural Forces and Rural America: Shifting Fortunes across Communities, Linda Lobao

28. Education and Schooling in Rural America

Kai A. Schafft and Catharine Biddle

29. Work in Rural America in the Era of Globalization

Tim Slack

30. Rural Entrepreneurship

Lori A. Dickes and Kenneth L. Robinson

31. Community Organization and Mobilization in Rural America

Cornelia Butler Flora and Jan L. Flora

32. Community as Moral Proximity: Theorizing Community in a Global Economy

Todd L. Goodsell, Jeremy Flaherty, and Ralph B. Brown

33. Food Insecurity and Obesity in Rural America: Paradoxes of the Modern Agrifood System

Keiko Tanaka, Patrick H. Mooney and Brett Wolff

34. Thinking About Rural Health

E. Helen Berry

35. Housing in Rural America

Katherine MacTavish, Ann Ziebarth, and Lance George

Author

Conner Bailey is Professor of Rural Sociology at Auburn University. He is a past President of the Rural Sociological Society. His primary research interests are in natural resources and the environment as well as questions of poverty and power in the southeastern United States.

Leif Jensen is Distinguished Professor of Rural Sociology and Demography at Pennsylvania State University. His primary interests are in rural sociology, social stratification, demography, and international development.

Elizabeth Ransom is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Richmond. Her primary research interests are in international development, global agriculture and food systems with an emphasis on Southern Africa, and science and technology studies especially in relation to agriculture and food. 

Reviews

Summary

On April 5, 2010, an explosion ripped through Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine, killing twenty-nine coal miners. This tragedy was the deadliest mine disaster in the United States in forty years—a disaster that never should have happened. These deaths were rooted in the cynical corporate culture of Massey and its notorious former CEO Don Blankenship, and were part of an endless cycle of poverty, exploitation, and environmental abuse that has dominated the Appalachian coalfields since coal was first discovered there. And the cycle continues unabated as coal companies bury the most insidious dangers deep underground, all in search of higher profits, and hide the true costs from regulators, unions, and investors alike.

But the disaster at Upper Big Branch goes beyond the coalfields of West Virginia. It casts a global shadow, calling into bitter question why coal miners in the United States are sacrificed to erect cities on the other side of the world, why the coal wars have been allowed to rage, polarizing the country, and how the world’s voracious appetite for energy is satisfied at such horrendous cost.

With Thunder on the Mountain, Peter A. Galuszka pieces together the true story of greed and negligence behind the tragedy at the Upper Big Branch Mine, and in doing so he has created a devastating portrait of an entire industry that exposes the coal-black motivations that led to the death of twenty-nine miners and fuel the ongoing war for the world’s energy future.

This new paper edition contains a foreword by Denise Giardina that provides an update on Massey Energy and Donald Blankenship, Chairman and CEO of Massey Energy Company during the UBB disaster, and recounts her own experiences with Massey Energy and the United Mine Workers Association in the 1980s. This edition also includes a notes section and a bibliography.

Contents

Coming Soon.

Author

Peter A. Galuszka is a veteran journalist who has covered worldwide energy issues, especially coal, for several decades. A former West Virginia resident, he logged thousands of miles on the windy mountain roads of Central Appalachia and traveled to Mongolia, China, and Japan to track down the Massey story. The former Moscow bureau chief for BusinessWeek, he now lives in Chesterfield, Virginia.

Denise Giardina grew up in a coal camp in McDowell County, West Virginia. She is a writer, ordained Episcopal Church deacon, and community activist. Her novels include Storming Heaven and The Unquiet Earth, both of which are set in the Appalachian coalfields.

Reviews