Shaun Slifer's history of the Appalachian Movement Press (AMP) is wonderfully weighty with full-color pages of high-quality photos and scans of archival materials. His tactile introduction to the press was during his first trip to Pipestem, West Virginia, when a friend “handed [him] a piece of history . . . almost entirely undocumented” (x): an undated “zine” by Appalachian Southern Folklife Center (ASFC) founder Don West called A Time for Anger (viii). This artifact ignited Slifer's curiosity, culminating in this valuable book.
Slifer is an artist and “community taught” historian (251). His professional credits include serving as creative director of the Mine Wars Museum in Matewan, and as a founding member of Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, which provided moral and material support for his AMP research. Aside from tangential references to AMP in histories such as Eller (2008) and Slifer's previous work through Justseeds (Slifer 2017, 2018),...
