Steven Stoll

"Ramp Hollow" is much more than a detailed history of Appalachia. It provides valuable perspectives on regions around the world based upon sustenance economies. He paints a gripping picture of life for the early settlers of Appalachia explaining that their success came from access to the "commons" represented by the forests of the area. The forests allowed them to hunt and gather what they needed beyond the patch of ground that they had staked out. When logging and coal mining companies arrived, they created enclosures that cut off these settlers from those commons in a way that impoverished those settlers.

The book provides a deep understanding of topics like the Whiskey Rebellion and the culture of settlers which are generally brushed over rapidly in American history classes. Stoll's book provides an excellent expansion of topics covered in Polanyi's "Great Transformation" and Graeber's "Debt: The First 5000 Years".

Finally, although the book is somewhat scholarly in tone, I found it a real page-turner.… (altro)

An easy to read introduction to the idea that growth cannot go on forever on a finite planet. Overall, I was disappointed. There was too much time spent on the history of one man who tried to found a colony in Venezuela and dreamt of a world of unlimited growth where no one would have to actually work, and not much time on what seemed to be the central premise of his work - that unlimited growth is not possible in a limited world. He touched on it in the introduction and the first chapter, but then he spent a lot of time talking about the history of this doomed project, giving a great deal of detail about things that were tangential, and then returned to the "delusion" of the title in the final chapter. This is a very important, worthwhile topic, and I was disappointed that it was not more developed. Overall, the book is well written, but left me feeling like it was somehow incomplete. It also seemed like it just stopped suddenly, while he was still developing his ideas, almost like the doorbell rang and he forgot to come back and finish.… (altro)