• "A remarkable book that carefully traces the letter writing of individuals from Appalachian families who struggled to maintain their homes in the face of an eminent domain removal in order for the federal government to create the Shenandoah National Park. Anyone who has hiked the section of the 'People's Path,' or the Appalachian National Scenic Trail, that winds through the Shenandoah National Park, will be moved to greater appreciation and clearer understanding of the human cost of creating this space."
—Ellen Cushman, Michigan State University, and citizen of the Cherokee Nation

•"Powell's book about Appalachian rhetoric is a case study of how literacy can be used to overpower the less literate rather than empower them. The book constitutes a counternarrative to Shenandoah National Park official history, using 300 letters in park archives written by families who were displaced upon the creation of the national park, authorized by Congress in 1926. Using this significant, newly catalogued corpus of letters, Powell reveals the many facets of the poor, disadvantaged writers, who took up letter writing to address the powerful park bureaucracy, despite their educational disadvantages. They wrote to resist the rhetorics used to describe them and created their own representations through their letters. The book is moving and interesting, containing elements of southern gothic genres such as dark humor, lawsuits, burning houses, and, ultimately, loss. Nonetheless, these writers ultimately used the skills available to them to write back to power and at times succeeded in making their displacement easier to bear. The rhetoric of displacement in the title expands in the final chapter to contemporary parallels. Powell not only extends our knowledge of literacy in Appalachia, but moves out globally to extend our knowledge of literacy in general."
—Catherine L. Hobbs, University of Oklahoma