Up South in the Ozarks: Dispatches from the Margins by Brooks Blevins, has been reviewed by Kevin C. Motl in the Journal of Southern History.
“Brooks Blevins, Noel Boyd Professor of Ozarks Studies at Missouri State University, delivers a savory anthology of essays on the Ozarks highlands—a region of mountains and plateaus extending from northwest Arkansas into southern Missouri and northeast Oklahoma—and its people in Up South in the Ozarks: Dispatches from the Margins. Of the thirteen chapters, six are new, while the remainder are republished material with modest revisions. Each chapter aspires to render the once-invisible visible. After all, as Blevins laments in a later chapter, Appalachia has a better publicist, and thus a lens into the world of the Ozarks comes only after a ‘generational lag,’ if at all (p. 220). Indeed, sustained scholarly inquiry into the folkways of the Ozarks people is a relatively recent development, and arguably the most authoritative work on the region to date comes from Blevins himself. … Whimsical and incisive in equal measure, Blevins blends the storytelling gifts of the folklorist with the keen lens of social science analysis. He purports not to caricature the people of his homeland but instead to complicate them through historical, sociological, economic, and anthropological scrutiny. The text is fairly haunted with the author’s memories and profound love for the places and people that define both his upbringing and his professional life and is all the richer and more engaging for it.”
Brooks Blevins is the Noel Boyd Professor of Ozarks Studies at Missouri State University. He published with the University of Illinois Press his capstone work—three volumes constituting the definitive history of the Ozarks. He is also the author or editor of ten other books, including Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ol’ Boys Defined a State.