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. The essays and creative work collected in Appalachian Reckoning provide a deeply personal portrait of a place that is at once culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American. Complicating simplistic visions that associate the region almost exclusively with death and decay, Appalachian Reckoning makes clear Appalachia's intellectual vitality, spiritual richness, and progressive possibilities.

For the first time, the speeches of His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales are being made available in a two-volume set in a collaborative effort by the University of Wales and the University of Maryland. Professors Suheil Bushrui and David Cadman have brought together a selection of speeches and articles by The Prince of Wales covering a period of over forty years, gathered together under headings that cover his principal interests and activities: the natural environment, expressed both as farming, forestry and fisheries, and then as climate change; architecture and the built environment; integrated medicine and health; society, religion and tradition; education, The Prince's Trust and Business in the Community. These volumes, intended as a work of reference, show The Prince of Wales as his ideas, knowledge and experience develop, from his first speech at the age of twenty in 1968 to his more recent speeches in 2012. What is most noteworthy, however, is that though the style of the speeches and articles have changed over the years, the overall message has remained consistent - not only in terms of environmental degradation and climate change, but also in matters relating to healthcare, urban form, organic farming and the need for greater respect and understanding between religions - all of which speaks volumes for The Prince's passion for and commitment to what he believes, even in times when his ideas were unconventional.