Tourism in the Mountain South: A Double-Edged Sword.

Tourism in the Mountain South: A Double-Edged Sword. By C. Brenden Martin. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007. Pp. [xxii], 246. $32.00, ISBN 978-1-57233-575-2.)

Tourism's contribution to the highland South has not been a simple thing to evaluate. The industry's impact has been both positive and negative, and southern highland residents, far from being passive bystanders or victims in this story, have found themselves on both ends of the spectrum. The first book-length study of tourism to incorporate a broad swath of the highland South, Tourism in the Mountain South: A Double-Edged Sword is a solid account of a critical and sometimes complex segment of the region's history.

Author C. Brenden Martin has arranged the book both thematically and chronologically, beginning with the emergence of antebellum spas that catered to the southern elite and following with two sections devoted to two distinct eras of postbellum tourism. The first, 1865-1914, was marked by, among other things, the decline of the spas, the emergence of the railroad as the key to tourist accessibility, and the tourist-inspired development of the dual image of the southern highlander as noble mountaineer and buffoonish hillbilly. The second, 1914-2000, chronicles an era in which automobile travel democratized mountain tourism and describes how the combination of federal and state government initiatives and entrepreneurialism by both highland residents and newcomers created areas of the mountain South-Asheville, North Carolina, and the Great Smoky Mountains gateway area of Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, Tennessee, are among those highlighted by Martin--almost wholly dependent on the tourism industry. Martin divides the discussion in each section according to three tourism-related themes: economics, culture, and the natural environment.

Martin finds that tourism presented a mixed bag for the highland South. Comparing the "double-edged sword" of tourism to New South industrialization, he writes, "The modern tourist trade provided much-needed income, employment, entrepreneurial opportunities, and revenue ..., but it also preserved the low-wage labor force, seasonal employment patterns, and boom-to-bust economic cycles that characterized larger New South economic patterns after 1914" (p. 106). Likewise, tourism hastened the demise of the handicrafts culture in the region but also played a primary role in reviving and preserving handicrafts production, or at least a contrived version of it. Perhaps nowhere is the paradox of the tourist industry more apparent than in the physical landscape of the highland South. Though the scenic beauty and natural resources of the mountains have long been integral to tourism in the region, twentieth-century phenomena such as ridgetop highways, mountainside subdivisions, and polluted streams prompt Martin to observe that, ironically, "tourist-related development destroys the very thing that attracts people" (p. 193).

Martin, like most current-generation scholars of Appalachia, eschews the old colonial/victimization interpretation in favor of a more nuanced approach, one that recognizes the significant roles that natives played in the development of tourism and in the perpetuation of the often negative imagery associated with the region. Tourism in the Mountain South suffers from occasional redundancy, a by-product perhaps of Martin's thematic-within-chronological approach or of poor editing in general. And if much of this story looks familiar, it is. Martin has relied heavily (and wisely so) on recent works by Durwood Dunn, Richard D. Starnes, Anthony Harkins, Daniel S. Pierce, and Lynn Morrow and Linda Myers-Phinney, among others. Tourism in the Mountain South is a valuable contribution to and excellent synthesis of the growing body of highland tourism scholarship.

BROOKS BLEVINS

Lyon College