very evident when you travel to the piedmont region of the carolinas but he printed a chain of truck stops with fast food restaurants. all the while the dash countryside was collapsing. walmart and multinational oil companies were making it almost impossible for him to compete and in the meanwhile tobacco was dying as an industry and so were textiles the other mainstay of life trade by the time he tried to make a go of it as an entrepreneur the war -- rural south was beginning to look a lot like the core of our cities with rampant drug abuse and multiple generations on public assistance, unemployment and kind of despair settling in. dean price like all the characters in the book, had a vision of how he could resuscitate the collapsing order around him and he had a series of epiphanies. being a man from a religious area although he turned and rebelled against his father's harsher christianity he remained a spiritual man and his vision was a kind of revival of the countryside through what was right at handch