traditional crafts and craftspeople are still with us, and efforts are continually being made to keep them a part of the craft scene, the average craftsperson is now university- or craft-school-trained. He/she knows the market, knows something about exhibiting and selling, and is often a clever business person. Given all this, area craftspeople are becoming more and more "mainstream," their work indistinguishable from that of other areas. Barker draws astute conclusions about the recent history and the future of crafts. Surprisingly, after so many years of working for and with government funding, he concludes that often the subsidies did more harm than good. Knowing nothing about crafts, government agencies have often supported groups with poor standards of work or organization—or none. Or they have instituted training programs on the premise that any craft can be taught to anyone in six easy lessons. The private organizations, the guilds, with or without outside subsidies, have been the ones who have upheld standards and have lasted, while government subsidized ones are gone. Yet even the guilds have become less important to the present knowledgeable craftsperson, who no longer depends upon them for his training and his complete marketing. Craft fairs, once the exclusive property of the guilds, have proliferated into the hundreds, as have craft shops. The days when guild fairs drew astronomical crowds and made ever increasing amounts ofmoney are past. The craft world is changing. But, says Barker, craftspeople still work from love of craft, and crafts will continue to grow in importance in Appalachia. They will grow in sophistication, too, but there will be traditional crafts as long as there is a demand for them. Barker ends his book by hoping there will be much more written on this subject. This writer joins him in that hope. —Bernice A. Stevens John Egerton. Shades of Gray: Dispatches from the Modern South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991. Hardback. $24.95. This book, like the region it describes, is not necessarily what it appears to be. John Egerton has collected thirteen essays, written between 1967 and 1988, that give us at once the darkness and the light of this paradoxical region. But the book is more than just a collection by a distinguished and insightful writer; it gives us a seat on the front porch of the big house from which the reader can survey that place which in Egerton's words, "retains a seemingly infinite capacity to intrigue and fascinate both residents and visitors, to seize their attention and hold it." For Egerton, the South is an enigma defined largely by ironic twists of character. A region abundant with national literary personalities, the South remains one of the least literate areas of the United States. A region known for religious piety and fervor, the South is characterized by violence and mayhem. 67 In a region renowned for courtesy and civility, the specter of racism and inequality remains to be exorcised. Egerton handles these complexities objectively and fairly, acknowledging the realities, both good and bad, in the region and its people. As a region within a region, Appalachia has a significant share in the southern experience. Two essays, "West Virginia's Battle of the Books" and "The King Coal Good Times Blues," are emblematic of tensions within the southern mountains that might appear on the surface to be merely regional peculiarities, only to have Egerton turn them into issues of national importance. In Charleston , West Virginia, the struggle over school textbooks was not a clash of fundamentalists and atheists or hillbillies and city slickers; instead Egerton suggests that this battie of the books was part of "a class war, a cultural war, a religious war," that was "a complex and disturbing reflection of the deep fissures that crisscross American society." In Martin County, Kentucky, site of Lyndon Johnson's 1964 visit to launch the War on Poverty, it turned out that the agent of economic recovery was not the federal government but the coal industry. Martin County became an example not of government-induced prosperity but a demonstration model of Reaganomics and unfettered free enterprise . Unemployment plummeted, annual income rose steadily, and the coal and railroad industries...