For over a century and a half, academics, public policy experts, and government bureaucrats have examined the causes and consequences of America's rural poverty “problem.” Often, they found the root cause of the issue in the people themselves—those isolated, white mountain folk viewed as shiftless, lazy, criminally inclined, intellectually stunted, and genetically inferior. This perception was mirrored through popular culture in books like Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, TV shows like The Beverly Hillbillies, and movies like Deliverance. In his provocative book Peculiar Places, Ryan Cartwright puts a new spin on this old topic by examining rural white America through the lens of queer and disability studies. A professor of American studies at the University of California, Davis, Cartwright uses a case study approach to investigate not only the individuals who have inhabited what he calls “peculiar places,” but also the people who have scrutinized and studied those mountain folk. He concludes that “the estranged ways of looking” at these peculiar places by outsiders have led to a series of “cultural narratives naming poor rural white communities as sites of perverse sexuality, deformed bodies, [and] deranged minds” (3). While generally succeeding in showing that difference does not necessarily equate to disability, and that the lifestyle choices made by these individuals may be appropriate and acceptable within community norms, his reliance on arcane social science jargon often inhibits his ability to get his points across. Despite this weakness, the book offers an interesting examination of the ways in which both popular culture and academic discourse have worked, often in tandem, to marginalize and stigmatize rural white nonconforming people.After a turgid first chapter Cartwright hits his stride with a compelling chapter on eugenic family studies in the early twentieth century. Examining what he calls “an entire imagined world of rural white deviance,” he discovers a different domain—one of “mutual support, nonnormative kinship arrangements, and part-time work in the informal economy” (26, 29). By using the lens of disability, Cartwright concludes that fieldworkers (often women trained at the Eugenic Record Office on Long Island) “gathered up bits of gossip” and used that information to segregate, institutionalize, and possibly sterilize those individuals they viewed as delinquent, degenerate, or deficient. Building on this stereotype, Cartwright looks at the rural photographs of the 1930s Farm Security Administration (FSA), exemplified by Dorothea Lange's iconic Migrant Mother. He maintains that these pictures “attempted to rehabilitate images of rural whiteness” (84).Since the mid-twentieth century, the genre of slasher / psychotic maniac / horror film has become a staple of American cinema. These films were often based on the true story of Ed Gein, a fifty-one-year-old bachelor from rural Wisconsin arrested in 1957 for a horrific series of murders and dismemberments. Sentenced to life in a Wisconsin mental hospital, Gein's story became fodder for newspaper and magazine articles throughout the country. Cartwright analyzes Gein's life by examining the relationship between “rural white landscapes [and] psychiatric disability, physical disability, poverty, and sexuality” (117). He questions whether Gein's madness was related to his living on the edge of civilization, what Cartwright calls his “metaphorical proximity to the primitive” (111). By discussing these issues, Cartwright brings up the possibility that urban elites find Gein not so different from other residents of these rural areas.Cartwright then moves to examine a very different form of rural detection. In what is perhaps his strongest chapter, he takes a look at the 1960s rediscovery of rural Appalachian poverty, most associated with the 1962 publication of Michael Harrington's The Other America. He ties Harrington's discussion on the culture of poverty in Appalachian America to the work of Oscar Lewis on Puerto Rican urban blight and the infamous Moynihan Report on the pathology of the urban female-headed Black family. While many praise Harrington's work and others like it as the impetus for Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, Cartwright instead claims they simply verified mainstream “anti-idyllic expectations and ways of looking” (119). Cartwright concludes that many of the problems “discovered” by Harrington “need not be understood as inherently pathological” (125). In other words, difference may be simply difference, and need not be labeled as disabling. He also deftly ties in notions of race by examining how these poor white mountain folk did not live up to notions of white superiority. “The problem of white poverty, to many,” he determines, “was that it prevented white people from fully realizing the privileges of being white” (142).Cartwright moves from the academic world of Michael Harrington and the governmental attempts to ameliorate both poverty and assumed pathological ways of living to an examination of the depiction of rural “defectiveness” through movies like Deliverance and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Building on ideas of rural disability, poverty, and perversion connected to Ed Gein, Cartwright writes that these films “cemented the association between a nonhuman animal and a person with intellectual, developmental, or mental disabilities” (157). The films also stereotyped rural Americans as sexual perverts while classifying nonheterosexual relationships as both inherently nonconsensual and morally repugnant. Cartwright condemns that type of analysis, as he announces that “sexual difference and disabilities were understood as elements of the mundane social landscape. . . . They were markers of a heterogeneous community like any other, associated with both difficulty and joy, not reducible to a generic rural horror” (162).Cartwright ends the book where he starts it—with an examination of the Ward brothers, four older, intellectually disabled bachelors living together on a farm in upstate New York. In 1990 one brother died and another was charged with his murder. The story, much like that of Ed Gein, became a national sensation, as media broadcast a “story about a family of murderous, incestuous, and grotesquely ‘deformed’ hillbillies” (2). Cartwright disputes these claims and asserts that while the Ward brothers may have “farmed more slowly and less efficiently than their neighbors,” they still possessed “knowledge, skills, and intimacies . . . in spite of their eccentricities” (181). This is the conclusion Cartwright draws: that people living on the margins of society may be different but need not be labeled as defective. Moving past the academic prose that often clutters his pages, Cartwright tells a valuable story here. The stories of, as he labels them, queer and crip people are more complicated and nuanced and important than we have imagined.