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Lexington or Cincinnati to take a high-paying job. The highest value seems instead to be a fierce loyalty. For example, when Clay graduates from high school, finds a job and moves away, "Gabe and Easter [are] both torn all to pieces, and he [is] only moving ten miles away" (15). This strikes the contemporary reader as strange, but it is consistent with the worldview the novel portrays. Indeed, Free Creek itself is the strongest force in the novel. It is Clay's family's place, the place his people are meant to be. It is even the place where Clay can feel the presence of the divine, a place where he feels "God floating all around ... burning into the trees, popping on the air" (47). Clearly the strength of this tie takes precedence over differences in lifestyle or personal habits. For example, although Easter has no use for the barroom lifestyle Clay is leading, she never considers shunning him. Similarly, she lives a common life with her hard-partying brother, Gabe. Her religiosity and Gabe's debauchery would have been the end of many families, but here they bear only secondary importance. Ties to kin and place are the primary values of these characters, values that supplant the influence of mass culture or the dictates of a single type of religious expression. Although the book has occasional weaknesses (I was troubled by two references to a fiddle's frets, an error which, at least for a page or two, shadows the accuracy of other details), it earns its place among contemporary Appalachian literature, and it deserves attention outside the region as well. House's empathetic depth, his deft description, and his skill in finding the perfect metaphor make each page worth reading twice—and in good company. His thematic strains suggest the almost mystical tie to place and kin that one senses in workby Gurney Norman, Wendell Berry, or even James Still. The influence of mass culture and its icons on the lives of Appalachians might be more reminiscent of Bobbie Anne Mason's work. The strong romantic element, however, along with House's use of the fantastic, settles Clay's Quilt more comfortably in the company of Lee Smith—not a bad place for any novel to be. —William Jolliff Philip J. Obermiller, Thomas E. Wagner, and E. Bruce Tucker, eds. Appalachian Odyssey: Historical Perspectives on the Great Migration. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000. xxiv, 242 pp. The editors of this volume have collected together essays by a number of writers on various aspects of the "Great Migration," that part of Appalachian migration "into the metropolitan centers 68 surrounding the mountains" (xi), which took place between 1940 and 1960, They focus on four major topics: out migration, what urbanités thought of their new neighbors, the migrants' sometimes painful formation of an identity for their new locales, and the creation of migrant organizations in their new homes. In section one, Chad Berry presents information from collected oral histories of migrants; Rebecca J. Bailey, Shirley L. Stewart and Connie L. Rice relate stories about their own families' lives in Chicago and Cleveland, and Roger Guy conveys the results of interviews of "southern white" migrants in Chicago. In section two, Bruce Tucker, Phillip J, Obermeyer and Thomas E. Wagner write about attempts by city leaders and others to assist the migrants. In section three, Tucker, John Hartigan, Jr., and Theresa Myadze discuss issues of urban Appalachian identity. In the final section, Obermiller and Wagner trace the development of urban Appalachian organizations in Dayton, Akron, Detroit, Cincinnati and other cities. The issues of the Appalachians' urban identity and "ethnicity"— their history, evolution, and redefinition over time—are two of the most important topics discussed in this book. Tucker, Obermiller, and Wagner pay particular attention to these questions. They note that one of the earliest theorists of mountain culture in the city was Roscoe Giffin, who held a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Illinois. In the 1950s, Giffin, who taught sociology at Berea College, proposed a "dysfunctionality" theory of mountain culture. Giffin "invent[ed] a description of Appalachia as a problematic subculture and propos[ed] a solution to deal with...

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