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Rural Communities, Legacy and Change. 3rd ed. Cornelia Butler Flora and Jan L. Flora. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. 2008. 379 pages. $45.00.
Many people imagine a rural America characterized by farming, homogeneous cultures, and close-knit communities. In reality, rural communities differ more among themselves than they do, on average, from urban areas (p. 25). Today, rural America is a complex mixture of peoples and cultures snuggling for survival. Rural peoples range in character from workers in manufacturing plants in Georgia to Laotian immigrants who have relocated in Kansas to work at a beef processing plant; from farmers committed to sustainable agriculture to entrepreneurs planning a world-class ski resort in California's Sierra Nevada; from laid-off miners in West Virginian to Native Americans in the Southwest searching for an economy consistent with their cultural values. These are all parts of rural America, seldom heard of in the mass media but deeply reflective of the legacies left by those who settled the land.
One of the most widely used sociology textbooks in the market, the third edition of Rural Communities is designed to help identify, analyze and address problems that are found in rural parts of the United States by examining the diversity of rural America: its communities, the social issues they face in the twenty-first century, and the ways rural communities use their history and their increasing connectedness to creatively address those issues.
Thorough revisions have been made with each new edition. The first edition of Rural Communities: Legacy and Change was written in 1992 to accompany a video series by the same name for PBS. As the field of community studies advanced, me second edition was substantially reorganized and the conceptual framework of community capitals introduced. The third edition is reorganized once again to show the relationships between material and social elements of rural communities in me community capitals framework. It also offers an increased focus on community agency in response to structure, an assets-based approach to community, focusing on what is already present in each community to address local issues. Tables, figures, cases, and data in the text also have been updated.
The analysis assumes that social issues can be explained in terms of a community's history and the resulting capital that is available to...