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Restless Heart: Kentucky's Search for Individual Liberty and Community. By James Larry Hood. (Lanham, Md., and other cities: University Press of America, Inc., c. 2008. Pp. xx, 136. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 978-0-76 1 8-4032-9; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 978-0-7618-4044-2.)
James Larry Hood chose well to use Michael Kammen's People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization (New York, 1972) as a theoretical framework with which to explore the evolution of Kentucky's culture since the 1770s. Americans are unique, Kämmen explained, because the unresolved contradictions in the American experience have given its culture a distinctive texture, pattern, and momentum - a national "style." Americans are puritanical and hedonistic, idealistic and materialistic, peace-loving and warmongering. These paradoxes intensified as a result of the dynamic interaction of the colonists and the indigenous people.
However, in Restless Heart: Kentucky's Search for...