In their introduction, Michelle Nickerson and Darren Dochuk trace the evolution of the Sunbelt concept and suggest that it is time “to revisit the Sunbelt as an analytic category” (p. 13). The volume succeeds in generating new ways of thinking about the Sunbelt and in documenting recent changes. Whether thinking of the Sunbelt as a region is useful depends upon the particular questions being asked. The volume's thirteen chapters, covering a wide range of developments during and after World War II, are organized thematically in four sections.

Section I offers insights on political conservatism. Elizabeth Shermer focuses on the ideology and activities of pro-business boosters in Phoenix, Arizona. Her essay is based heavily on dissertation research that will be available in her forthcoming book. Joseph Crespino examines Strom Thurmond's role in the emergence of a new political synthesis of South and West, rooted in national security concerns and anticommunist conservatism. The conservative movement in Cobb County, Georgia, is studied by Matthew Lassiter, who challenges several models seeking to explain Republican ascendancy. Lyman Kellstedt and James Guth present a statistical overview of religion and Sunbelt voting patterns.

Section II focuses on racial/ethnic alliances and discrimination. Shana Bernstein argues that Los Angeles' progressive alliance (Mexican, Japanese, and Jewish American) influenced later desegregation efforts, notably Brown v. Board of Education. N. D. B. Connolly argues that black civil rights activists and white urban planners and corporate leaders in Miami used eminent domain as a tool against substandard housing for blacks. Urban renewal and highway construction, however, ultimately reduced urban black homeownership while providing lucrative opportunities for white tenement owners. Daniel HoSang describes how a particular kind of liberal racial politics, grounded in beliefs about “homeowners' rights” and the need to defend them against an incursive government, led to legal enshrinement of a “right to discriminate” when a fair housing ballot proposition in California was defeated.

Section III highlights power and inequality between central and peripheral places. Volker Janssen charts the rise of the Sunbelt prison population and the “hyper-carceral state.” In California, prisons became central features of suburban landscapes and local and state politics. Andrew Needham explores impacts of Sunbelt cities on Navaho lands and people, whose natural resources could fuel metropolitan growth, and how Sunbelt politicians sought to reshape federal resource policy and administration. Carl Abbott also emphasizes indigenous peoples, using the lens of four novels set in the Southwest to examine competing claims that surfaced as Anglo-Americans remade places, turning land into real estate in pursuit of capital accumulation.

Section IV addresses globalization, moving beyond a binary Sunbelt/Snowbelt opposition within the United States. Darren Grem explores Chick-fil-A, an Atlanta- based fast food corporation operating in the global South. Laresh Jayasanker provides a fascinating account of the transnational political economy of U.S., Mexican, and worldwide tortilla production and consumption. She notes that liberalization led to substantial exports of goods and capital from Mexico to the United States, in addition to more familiar flows of labor northward and capital southward. Sylvia Manzano's essay on the Sunbelt's rapidly growing Latino population provides another example, along with globalization and the rise of neoliberalism, of important ways the Sunbelt story has changed since the 1970s.

The authors provide varying perspectives on the usefulness of the Sunbelt category. Several emphasize diversity within the Sunbelt. Kellstedt and Guth assert that “from a religious and political perspective, the Sunbelt does not hang together all that well as a single region” (p. 137). Regional differences are less important than religious differences in explaining partisan affiliations and positions on specific issues. Manzano contrasts Latino political participation and representation in the Southwest and Florida versus the South. Abbott argues that differing histories in the Southeast and Southwest led the functions of the Sunbelt concept to vary.

Homogeneity is only one possible criterion for defining a region. Another conception of region is a city and its hinterlands, which may be multiple and overlapping. The Sunbelt is not a region with one metropolitan center, but center-periphery ideas are usefully employed in Sunbelt Rising, which includes interesting essays highlighting Sunbelt hinterlands and the prisons and Native American reservations located there. The distinctiveness of these economic and political processes could be explored further. How different are natural resource extraction, treatment of indigenous communities, or effects of super-max prisons on local communities, in hinterlands in non-Sunbelt states?

An interesting thread running through several essays is property rights and the use of government power to defend or abrogate them. Connolly's treatment of eminent domain in Miami is joined by Lassiter's discussion of the centrality of zoning in suburban politics and HoSang's analysis of Proposition 14's enduring impact in helping to “valorize a set of ideas about the ‘rights' particular homeowners possessed” (p. 210). According to HoSang, these ideas, including a “right to discriminate,” were reflected in outcomes of ballot initiatives during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Regions of California supporting Proposition 14 in 1964 later voted to prohibit school desegregation, end bilingual voting materials, and eliminate public services for undocumented immigrants, among other measures. Needham describes policies promoted by Phoenix boosters to eliminate tribal jurisdictions and bring Indian lands into the market. Rejecting New Deal natural resource policy, they sought to open the public domain to private development. The consequences of commodifying land also are explored by Abbott, who highlights conflicts over property rights in land and water, particularly between newly arrived and more long-standing residents.

One of the central paradoxes of the Sunbelt continues to be the coexistence of what Lassiter calls a “forceful defense of free market capitalism” and a growth strategy heavily underwritten by federal support (p. 91). The region's boosters, as Shermer and Needham describe, pursued anti-New Deal policies with the goal of reshaping, but certainly not eliminating, a powerful role for government in the economy. As the essays show, government's role, and attitudes toward that role, have been crucial in shaping Sunbelt history.