Best Sociology of Rural Areas Books

Here you will get Best Sociology of Rural Areas Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.

1. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

Author: by J. D. Vance
0062300555
Harper Paperbacks
English

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THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER IS NOW A MAJOR-MOTION PICTURE DIRECTED BY RON HOWARD AND STARRING AMY ADAMS, GLENN CLOSE, AND GABRIEL BASSO”You will not read a more important book about America this year.”The Economist “A riveting book.”The Wall Street Journal”Essential reading.”David Brooks, New York TimesHillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisisthat of white working-class Americans.

The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside.J.D.

Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America.J. D.’s grandparents were dirt poor and in love, and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them.


2. Where There Is No Doctor: A Village Health Care Handbook

Author: by David Werner
Hesperian Health Guides
English
446 pages

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Hesperian’s classic manual, Where There Is No Doctor, is arguably the most widely-used health care manual in the world. This 2020 updated reprint features updated medication information, a newly revised family planning chapter, new treatments for a variety of infections, and more.

All Hesperian books are regularly updated and reprinted to reflect accurate medical information. Useful for health workers, clinicians, and others involved in primary health care delivery and health promotion programs, with millions of copies in print in more than 75 languages, the manual provides practical, easily understood information on how to diagnose, treat, and prevent common diseases.

Special attention is focused on nutrition, infection and disease prevention, and diagnostic techniques as primary ways to prevent and treat health problems.


3. Downeast: Five Maine Girls and the Unseen Story of Rural America

Author: by Gigi Georges
Harper (May 25, 2021)
English
288 pages

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In Downeast, Gigi Georges follows five girls as they come of age in one of the most challenging and geographically isolated regions on the Eastern seaboard. Their stories reveal surprising truths about rural America and offer hope for its future.

It’s almost impossible not to care about these fierce young women and cheer for their hard-won successes (Kirkus) in this heartfelt portrait and worthy tribute (Publishers Weekly). Nestled in Maine’s far northeast corner, Washington County sits an hour’s drive from the heart of famed and bustling Acadia National Park.

Yet it’s a world away. For Willow, Vivian, Mckenna, Audrey, and Josiefive teenage girls caught between tradition and transformation in this remote regionit is home. Downeast follows their journeys of heartbreak and hope in uncertain times, creating a nuanced and unique portrait of rural America with women at its center.

Willow lives in the shadow of an abusive, drug-addicted father and searches for stability through photography and love. Vivian, a gifted writer, feels stifled by her church and town, and struggles to break free without severing family ties. Mckenna is a softball pitching phenom whose passion is the lobster-fishing she learned at her father’s knee.


4. Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

Author: by H.G. Bissinger
Da Capo Press Inc.
English
432 pages

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Named Sports Illustrated’s best football book of all time and a #1 NYT bestseller, this is the classic story of a high school football team whose win-loss record has a profound influence on the town around them. Return once again to the timeless account of the Permian Panthers of Odessa – the winningest high-school football team in Texas history.

Socially and racially divided, Odessa isn’t known to be a place big on dreams, but every Friday night from September to December, when the Panthers play football, dreams can come true. With frankness and compassion, Pulitzer Prize winner H.G.

Bissinger unforgettably captures a season in the life of Odessa and shows how single-minded devotion to the team shapes the community and inspires – and sometimes shatters – the teenagers who wear the Panthers’ uniforms. The inspiration for the hit television program and film of the same name, this anniversary edition features a new afterword by the author.


5. Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains

Author: by Cassie Chambers
Ballantine Books
English
304 pages

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After rising from poverty to earn two Ivy League degrees, an Appalachian lawyer pays tribute to the strong hill women who raised and inspired her, and whose values have the potential to rejuvenate a struggling region. Destined to be compared to Hillbilly Elegy and Educated.

BookPage (starred review) Poverty is enmeshed with pride in these stories of survival. Associated Press Nestled in the Appalachian mountains, Owsley County is one of the poorest counties in both Kentucky and the country. Buildings are crumbling and fields sit vacant, as tobacco farming and coal mining decline.

But strong women are finding creative ways to subsist in their hollers in the hills. Cassie Chambers grew up in these hollers and, through the women who raised her, she traces her own path out of and back into the Kentucky mountains.

Chambers’s Granny was a child bride who rose before dawn every morning to raise seven children. Despite her poverty, she wouldn’t hesitate to give the last bite of pie or vegetables from her garden to a struggling neighbor. Her two daughters took very different paths: strong-willed Ruththe hardest-working tobacco farmer in the countystayed on the family farm, while spirited Wilmathe sixth childbecame the first in the family to graduate from high school, then moved an hour away for college.


6. The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Author: by Jane Jacobs
Vintage
English
458 pages

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A direct and fundamentally optimistic indictment of the short-sightedness and intellectual arrogance that has characterized much of urban planning in this century, The Death and Life of Great American Cities has, since its first publication in 1961, become the standard against which all endeavors in that field are measured.

In prose of outstanding immediacy, Jane Jacobs writes about what makes streets safe or unsafe; about what constitutes a neighborhood, and what function it serves within the larger organism of the city; about why some neighborhoods remain impoverished while others regenerate themselves.

She writes about the salutary role of funeral parlors and tenement windows, the dangers of too much development money and too little diversity. Compassionate, bracingly indignant, and always keenly detailed, Jane Jacobs’s monumental work provides an essential framework for assessing the vitality of all cities.


7. Janesville: An American Story

Author: by Amy Goldstein
B01MT2X3AD
Simon & Schuster
April 18, 2017

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Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year * Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize * 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year * A New York Times Notable Book * A Washington Post Notable Book * An NPR Best Book of 2017 * A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2017 * An Economist Best Book of 2017 * A Business Insider Best Book of 2017 * A gripping story of psychological defeat and resilience (Bob Woodward, The Washington Post)an intimate account of the fallout from the closing of a General Motors assembly plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, and a larger story of the hollowing of the American middle class.

This is the story of what happens to an industrial town in the American heartland when its main factory shuts downbut it’s not the familiar tale. Most observers record the immediate shock of vanished jobs, but few stay around long enough to notice what happens next when a community with a can-do spirit tries to pick itself up.

Pulitzer Prizewinning reporter Amy Goldstein spent years immersed in Janesville, Wisconsin, where the nation’s oldest operating General Motors assembly plant shut down in the midst of the Great Recession. Now, with intelligence, sympathy, and insight into what connects and divides people in an era of economic upheaval, Goldstein shows the consequences of one of America’s biggest political issues.


8. Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

Author: by Beth Macy
Back Bay Books
English
400 pages

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Soon to be a Hulu Original Series Journalist Beth Macy’s definitive account of America’s opioid epidemic “masterfully interlaces stories of communities in crisis with dark histories of corporate greed and regulatory indifference” (New York Times) – from the boardroom to the courtroom and into the living rooms of Americans.

In this extraordinary work, Beth Macy takes us into the epicenter of a national drama that has unfolded over two decades. From the labs and marketing departments of big pharma to local doctor’s offices; wealthy suburbs to distressed small communities in Central Appalachia; from distant cities to once-idyllic farm towns; the spread of opioid addiction follows a tortuous trajectory that illustrates how this crisis has persisted for so long and become so firmly entrenched.

Beginning with a single dealer who lands in a small Virginia town and sets about turning high school football stars into heroin overdose statistics, Macy sets out to answer a grieving mother’s question-why her only son died-and comes away with a gripping, unputdownable story of greed and need.


9. Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy

Author: by Anthony Harkins
English
432 pages
1946684791

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2020 American Book Award winner, Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award Weatherford Award winner, nonfiction With hundreds of thousands of copies sold, a Ron Howard movie in the works, and the rise of its author as a media personality, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis has defined Appalachia for much of the nation.

What about Hillbilly Elegy accounts for this explosion of interest during this period of political turmoil? Why have its ideas raised so much controversy? And how can debates about the book catalyze new, more inclusive political agendas for the region’s future?

Appalachian Reckoning is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow Hillbilly Elegy has cast over the region and its imagining. But it also moves beyond Hillbilly Elegy to allow Appalachians from varied backgrounds to tell their own diverse and complex stories through an imaginative blend of scholarship, prose, poetry, and photography.

10. Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

Author: by Sarah Smarsh
Scribner
English

‎ 320 pages

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Finalist for the National Book Award* *Finalist for the Kirkus Prize* *Instant New York Times Bestseller* *Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, New York Post, BuzzFeed, Shelf Awareness, Bustle, and Publishers Weekly* An essential read for our times: an eye-opening memoir of working-class poverty in America that will deepen our understanding of the ways in which class shapes our country and a deeply humane memoir that crackles with clarifying insight.

Sarah Smarsh was born a fifth generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side, and the product of generations of teen mothers on her maternal side. Through her experiences growing up on a farm thirty miles west of Wichita, we are given a unique and essential look into the lives of poor and working class Americans living in the heartland.

During Sarah’s turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, she enjoyed the freedom of a country childhood, but observed the painful challenges of the poverty around her; untreated medical conditions for lack of insurance or consistent care, unsafe job conditions, abusive relationships, and limited resources and information that would provide for the upward mobility that is the American Dream.

11. Twilight in Hazard: An Appalachian Reckoning

Author: by Alan Maimon

‎ English
304 pages
1612198856

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This book is harrowing, angering, and, most importantly, true. Wiley Cash, New York Times bestselling author of A Land More Kind Than HomeFrom investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize finalist Alan Maimon comes the story of how a perfect storm of events has had a devastating impact on life in small town Appalachia, and on the soul of a shaken nation …

When Alan Maimon got the assignment in 2000 to report on life in rural Eastern Kentucky, his editor at the Louisville Courier-Journal told him to cover the region like a foreign correspondent would. And indeed, when Maimon arrived in Hazard, Kentucky fresh off a reporting stint for the New York Times’s Berlin bureau, he felt every bit the outsider.

He had landed in a place in the vice grip of ecological devastation and a corporate-made opioid epidemica place where vote-buying and drug-motivated political assassinations were the order of the day. While reporting on the intense religious allegiances, the bitter, bareknuckled political rivalries, and the faltering attempts to emerge from a century-long coal-based economy, Maimon learns that everythingand nothingyou have heard about the region is true.

12. Canary in the Coal Mine: A Forgotten Rural Community, a Hidden Epidemic, and a Lone Doctor Battling for the Life, Health, and Soul of the People

Author: by Dr. William Cooke
English
320 pages
1496446488

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One doctor’s courageous fight to save a small town from a silent epidemic that threatened the community’s futureand exposed a national health crisis. When Dr. Will Cooke, an idealistic young physician just out of medical training, set up practice in the small rural community of Austin, Indiana, he had no idea that much of the town was being torn apart by poverty, addiction, and life-threatening illnesses.

But he soon found himself at the crossroads of two unprecedented health-care disasters: a national opioid epidemic and the worst drug-fueled HIV outbreak ever seen in rural America. Confronted with Austin’s hidden secrets, Dr. Cooke decided he had to do something about them.

In taking up the fight for Austin’s people, however, he would have to battle some unanticipated foes: prejudice, political resistance, an entrenched bureaucracyand the dark despair that threatened to overwhelm his own soul.: Canary in the Coal Mine is a gripping account of the transformation of a man and his adopted community, a compelling and ultimately hopeful read in the vein of Hillbilly Elegy, Dreamland, and Educated.

13. The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia

Author: by Emma Copley Eisenberg
B07RJR56W3
Hachette Books
January 21, 2020

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A NEW YORK TIMES “100 Notable Books of 2020” *A stunning, complex narrative about the fractured legacy of a decades-old double murder in rural West Virginiaand the writer determined to put the pieces back together. In the early evening of June 25, 1980 in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, two middle-class outsiders named Vicki Durian, 26, and Nancy Santomero, 19, were murdered in an isolated clearing.

They were hitchhiking to a festival known as the Rainbow Gathering but never arrived. For thirteen years, no one was prosecuted for the Rainbow Murders though deep suspicion was cast on a succession of local residents in the community, depicted as poor, dangerous, and backward.

In 1993, a local farmer was convicted, only to be released when a known serial killer and diagnosed schizophrenic named Joseph Paul Franklin claimed responsibility. As time passed, the truth seemed to slip away, and the investigation itself inflicted its own traumas-turning neighbor against neighbor and confirming the fears of violence outsiders have done to this region for centuries.

14. Diffusion of Innovations, 5th Edition

Author: by Everett M. Rogers
Free Press
English
576 pages

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Now in its fifth edition, Diffusion of Innovations is a classic work on the spread of new ideas. In this renowned book, Everett M. Rogers, professor and chair of the Department of Communication & Journalism at the University of New Mexico, explains how new ideas spread via communication channels over time.

Such innovations are initially perceived as uncertain and even risky. To overcome this uncertainty, most people seek out others like themselves who have already adopted the new idea. Thus the diffusion process consists of a few individuals who first adopt an innovation, then spread the word among their circle of acquaintancesa process which typically takes months or years.

But there are exceptions: use of the Internet in the 1990s, for example, may have spread more rapidly than any other innovation in the history of humankind. Furthermore, the Internet is changing the very nature of diffusion by decreasing the importance of physical distance between people.

The fifth edition addresses the spread of the Internet, and how it has transformed the way human beings communicate and adopt new ideas.

15. The Foxfire Book: Hog Dressing, Log Cabin Building, Mountain Crafts and Foods, Planting by the Signs, Snake Lore, Hunting Tales, Faith Healing, Moonshining, and Other Affairs of Plain Living

Author: by Eliot Wigginton
Anchor (February 17, 1972)
English
384 pages

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First published in 1972, The Foxfire Book was a surprise bestseller that brought Appalachia’s philosophy of simple living to hundreds of thousands of readers. Whether you wanted to hunt game, bake the old-fashioned way, or learn the art of successful moonshining, The Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center had a contact who could teach you how with clear, step-by-step instructions.

This classic debut volume of the acclaimed series covers a diverse array of crafts and practical skills, including log cabin building, hog dressing, basketmaking, cooking, fencemaking, crop planting, hunting, and moonshining, as well as a look at the history of local traditions like snake lore and faith healing.

16. Innovation in Real Places: Strategies for Prosperity in an Unforgiving World

Author: by Dan Breznitz
Oxford University Press
English
288 pages

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A challenge to prevailing ideas about innovation and a guide to identifying the best growth strategy for your community. Across the world, cities and regions have wasted trillions of dollars on blindly copying the Silicon Valley model of growth creation.

Since the early years of the information age, we’ve been told that economic growth derives from harnessing technological innovation. To do this, places must creategood education systems, partner with local research universities, and attract innovative hi-tech firms. We have lived with this system for decades, and the result is clear: a small number of regions and cities at the top of the high-tech industry but many more fighting a losing battle to retaineconomic dynamism.

But are there other models that don’t rely on a flourishing high-tech industry? In Innovation in Real Places, Dan Breznitz argues that there are. The purveyors of the dominant ideas on innovation have a feeble understanding of the big picture on global production and innovation.