Lost in Transition: Removing, Resettling, and Renewing Appalachia, edited by Aaron D. Purcell, speaks boldly on behalf of communities and individual landholders removed by federal and state authorities as part of titanic land-use experiments. The authors together provide an eminently valuable contrast to the triumphant, widely observed agency narratives about the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA); the Great Smoky Mountains, Shenandoah, and Mammoth Cave National Parks; and also the Manhattan Project. All of these ambitious and sweeping government initiatives have, in the public consciousness, saved parts of the mountain South from environmental devastation and economic doldrums. The authors here shift the focus to the people and the communities affected by those mass displacements—examining how they responded to or retaliated against the agencies’ incursions, the direct impacts of their removal, and how their memory of the removals has evolved through the present.
The book's chapters excel, though it seems that Purcell...