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Plain." Here, Batteau gives particular attention to the Council of the Southern Mountains, the work of the settlement schools, and to Jack Weller's· Yesterday 's People as the key text sharing the missionary's archetypical views. In a chapter of rather remarkable insight , Batteau treats hillbilly stereotypes found in the work of certain popular cartoonists, especially Paul Webb and Al Capp. Batteau sees these cartoonists as critics of American mainline culture who have used Appalachians as vehicles for this criticism. By creating totally unbelievable archetypes of a different America , a region as truly American as any other, the perennial symbiotic relationship between American and Appalachia is used with great effectiveness to lampoon modern American materialism and progress. Batteau has taken on a breathtakingly large task. The mere suggestion that writing about Appalachia can provide texts that reveal significant understandings of both Appalachia and America, places before us all an immense canvas. One can only applaud Allen Bateau for beginning the task of painting this immense picture. My only real quarrel with Batteau is in his selection of texts. For example, he completely ignores Emma Bell Miles, William G. Brownlow, and Cratis Williams as creators of significant images about Appalachia. And he has only disparaging remarks to make about John C. Campbell, whose book he judges completely "devoid of metaphors and poetry." Campbell, he claims, "simply presented descriptions of what he saw" in a formless way. (p. 81) At the same time,. Batteau has presented William G. Frost, Horace Kephart, and Harry Caudill in ways that were insightful and genuinely helpful. Allen Batteau has given us all a great deal to think about and to try to digest. This is a most challenging book that suggests new ways of dealing with the images that have so long plagued Appalachians . In his search for the key texts that have created these various stereotypes , I think Batteau needs significant challenging. But basically this is but carping at details. This is an important book. —Richard B. Drake Secreast, Donald. The Rat Becomes Light. Harper & Row. 1990. 217 pages. $18.95. Set among the mountains and small furniture factory towns of western North Carolina, Donald Secreast's stories are real wood hand-crafted and lovingly finished . There is nothing artificial here, no veneer of truth hiding shoddy workmanship . Nothing warps, the drawers slide easily, and the lines are sleek and contemporary. A story called "Rather Than Seem" might have given its title to the collection . Not only does it allude to North Carolina's motto, but it also suggests Secreast's central concern, what it means to "be" rather than to "seem." The story which did give the collection its title is about "becoming," which is another way of saying "being." The Rat in the title is Rawley Pendergraft, who has the dirtiest job at the Chalfant Furniture Factory. He stands at the end of the assembly line and wipes excess stain off the furniture. Permanently stained a ratty brown, the Rat stands for all of us who yearn for higher things. His journey to see the famous Brown Mountain Lights is an Appalachian Pilgrim's Progress. Finally, he becomes light. Most of the characters in Secreast's stories have some connection with the Chalfant factory in Boehm, North Carolina . The author himself, a native of Caldwell County, worked summers in such factories, so he knows that world well. "Factory Hand," a painful story about a woman who has a splinter driven 65 into her hand, and "Summer Help," a sad and funny account of an assembly line painter who yearns to be an artist, offer us an insider's look at how such workers keep going. To his credit, Secreast makes it clear that work matters in very human and humane ways. He is never condescending about laborers or polemical about labor. To him, character matters more. Telling a good story matters most. Stories in which nothing happens are tiresome and forgettable. The fourteen stories in this collection are lively and memorable. They are the kinds of stories one can "dine out on," as the British say, regaling dinner companions with someone else's funny stones. There is Wanda, who unwittingly becomes the destroyer...

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