I picked this book up off a best sellers table when I was in London this past March. I was looking for some good books to read on the long flight home but I had not gotten to this one until now.
I am very interested in family history and have researched my own family line back many generations. I believe that this book truly expresses why family history interests me so much. The tying together and weaving of the lives of the female clan members of this book show just how important heritage and family are. It tells of secrets that all families have hidden amongst their branches, of illegitimate children, of relationships between mothers and their children, of the relationships of mother-in laws with their children's spouses, of love, hate, loss, and triumph.
Even though this story takes place in a fictional place with fictional characters, its message is based on the lives of many that grew up in Austria during a time where farming, dairying, and war were common place. Even though my own life may not be anything like what it must have been like for the strong women figures of "Homestead", it is a life that is based on the choices, dreams, and goals of my ancestors and without them, I would not be where or who I am today.
Another interesting read that is similar to this book is "Oral History" by Lee Smith set in the Appalachian Mountains.

The success of this marvelous book springs from the passion of the telling -- the writer's deep conviction that the lives of the people who inhabit this remote Austrian village are invested with meaning. Their stories come to us chronologically, beginning with the period of the first war and ending in the late 1970s. Their daily experiences are shown to be all at once prosaic and extraordinary. The featured players in this drama are the women who grow up and spend their lives in one small place. But the real protagonist is the village itself, as expressed in the slowly changing character of daily life as years pass and people come into the world and live and die. At the end, modern life has insinuated itself into the community somewhat, but the elements that define common experience have changed very little. The triumph is in the author's ability to render ordinary events in ways that reveal the humanity of the people she writes about. Wonderfully told, beautifully written.

Rosina Lippi's book, HOMSTEAD, is a wondeful book about the strength and endurance and beauty of generations of peasant women living on small dairy farms high in the Austrian Alps. Though this book is listed as fiction, after glancing through the table of contents with all of its names, clan charts, naming conventions, pronounciation guides, and glossary, I thought it was going to be one of those books I would have to plough through along with the women in the book. Golly, it was daunting! However, before I finished the first chapter about Anna, and the Begat Homestead, 1909, I was intriuged and was happy to be flipping back and forth between all of these guides meeting women who had personality as well as endurance . I wanted to be a part of their lives and have them be a part of mine. Lippi has done a remarkable job of bringing these women to life. She tells about the inevitable disintegration of peasant life as the world shrinks in the face of technology. By sending me back to the simple peasant life in 1909, I realize how much I miss by having all of these machines do all of my work so I can save all of that time to use these machines. I don't much want to milk cows and make my own cheese, but I would like the strength these women had to face the world. This book reminds me of John Berger's trilogy, INTO THEIR LABOURS, which chronicles the creeping death of simplicity in the rural areas of the Alps of France.

Lippi-Green has gathered together a large amount of linguistic material on accents as social markers and prestige symbols. That is the good part of the book. She is somewhat correct in her analysis of why some accents are high status and some are low status. Mostly, it has something to do with wealth and power. The accents of the wealthy and the powerful are seen as "more correct" than those of the poor and underpriviledged. This is true to a degree but does not tell the whole story. Accent prestige also comes about when the most educated and highly skilled (M.D.s, etc.) and not always wealthy or powerful (teachers, writers) speak in certain patterns. In some cases, accent prestige is simply a result of celebrities speaking in certain ways (this can be seen in the adoption by white middle class teenagers of the black dialect of rap stars who are often from backgrounds that can hardly be considered wealthy or powerful. In the last century, the actor David Garrick was also seen as a model of a "good" accent and set pronunciation standards for many people). Lippi-Green is a fan of social deconstructionist philosopher Michel Foucault and her analysis adheres to one cliche after another. Her dated victimology lessens the value of what would have been an excellent book. Dividing the world into victims and victimizers is simplistic. She labels every categorization that people make based on accents to be discrimination when sometimes it is nothing more than a convenient categorization with no social consequences. This process is universal and occurs even in those groups that Lippi-Green believes are being discriminated against because of their accents (ex: African-Americans are known to percieve the use of "double negatives" ("I don't need no food") by other African-Americans as a sign of being less educated and proper). I also know from my own inner city students how even the underpriviledged categorize each other according to how "ghetto" their speech is. Lippi-Green's use of the very tired and cliched language of oppression made my eyes glaze over in several spots.
It is my opinion that most categorization based on accents is neither malevolent nor well-thought out but a result of the brain's natural tendency to seek out patterns in order to comprehend the environment and incoming stimuli. Lippi-Green, by using social deconstructionist models, is almost forced to see intentional oppression and evil intentions where none may exist. People do not always make assumptions about others based on their accents because they are wicked, nasty language nazis intent on keeping people locked into lifetimes of poverty and oppression. Sometimes they make assumptions simply because they are engaged in the natural process of induction based on the available data. I refuse to see a master with a whip in every individual who asks if I am from New York because I drop the occasional "r" when I speak.
Lippi-Green also takes umbrage at anyone who would dare to suggest that individuals can modify their accents (which they can and do) and that it might be to some individual's advantage to do so (for greater social and economic opportunities). It is. Lippi-Green avoids discussion of the fact that the courts have ruled, time and time again, that discrimination based on accents does NOT violate civil rights laws when the accent is a material obstacle to an individual performing the duties of a job (for example - a receptionist who cannot be understood by callers because of a strong accent, etc.). In such a case, the only way to get ahead would be for the individual to modify their accent. A speech pathologist (I happen to be one) is not a SS storm trooper defending a fascist system, but a trained specialist trying to help an individual learn the verbal skills necessary for employment in a competitive, service oriented economy. Facts are facts, and no matter how much Lippi-Green reconstructs and deconstructs reality into political fodder, speaking with high intelligibilty is a necessity for much advancement in the economy. This is not some empty promise. It is a fact. To mislead individuals to believe otherwise is performing a grave disservice and derailing them from learning employability skills into the dead end of political resentment.

This book explores the many issues surrounding language ideology and discrimination in the United States through providing a thorough discussion and empirical examination of the subjective issues which so often permeate such a loaded topic. It is an excellent read for anyone who is seriously interested in either language or subordination or both. I highly recommend this book for anyone who is interested in Pluralistic perspectives in America. Well-written and comprehensive.

This book is an excellent treatment of the complex issue of how discrimination is enacted and perpetuated by linguistic means. Lippi-Green examines in detail specific cases from a number of sources to show that bias is often disguised even from those who show it.

Though the book is at times on the technical side, Lippi-Green makes very good use of analogies likely to make this important topic clear and accessible to a wide audience.