Briefly Noted Book Reviews

A deeply researched account of the rightward turn in Appalachia, this study focusses on Pikeville, Kentucky, a small city once flush with coal-mining jobs that sits in what is now America's "whitest and second-poorest congressional district." Hochschild, a sociologist, posits that Pikeville's politics are shaped by grief about "stolen pride" and feelings of shame prompted by the region's decline. She interviews a range of residents--including a mayor, prisoners, and recovering drug addicts--to understand each person's relationship to these feelings. Some of her subjects experience "bootstrap pride"; others, like Matthew Heimbach, a co-founder of the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Workers Party, fashion themselves as moral outlaws. This polemic, by a cognitive scientist and startup founder, calls for stricter regulation of A.I.