Rainbow Pie is a coming-of-age memoir set between 1950 and 1963 in a small Appalachian farming community along a West Virginia road named Shanghai (from the seventeenth-century Scots Irish, 'Shangi', meaning to celebrate). Combining recollection, stories, accounts, remembrance, and analysis, we get an intimate look at what America lost in its post-war transformation - it went from a nation of interconnecting families and communities to a consumer culture of 'individuals'. This loss of meaningful work and community is illustrated through Joe's family and the Shanghai Road community, as post-World War II America experienced a massive social and economic shift from agrarian to urban consciousness. Observant readers will also come away with insights into what helped create America's politically conservative 'red staters', not to mention a restless new underclass - 'the second and third generation of displaced agrarians', as Gore Vidal described them.