The View from Flyover Country

Author: Sarah Kendzior
Publisher: Flatiron Books
ISBN: 1250189985
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 179

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES and MIBA BESTSELLER From the St. Louis–based journalist often credited with first predicting Donald Trump’s presidential victory. "A collection of sharp-edged, humanistic pieces about the American heartland...Passionate pieces that repeatedly assail the inability of many to empathize and to humanize." — Kirkus In 2015, Sarah Kendzior collected the essays she reported for Al Jazeera and published them as The View from Flyover Country, which became an ebook bestseller and garnered praise from readers around the world. Now, The View from Flyover Country is being released in print with an updated introduction and epilogue that reflect on the ways that the Trump presidency was the certain result of the realities first captured in Kendzior’s essays. A clear-eyed account of the realities of life in America’s overlooked heartland, The View from Flyover Country is a piercing critique of the labor exploitation, race relations, gentrification, media bias, and other aspects of the post-employment economy that gave rise to a president who rules like an autocrat. The View from Flyover Country is necessary reading for anyone who believes that the only way for America to fix its problems is to first discuss them with honesty and compassion. “Please put everything aside and try to get ahold of Sarah Kendzior’s collected essays, The View from Flyover Country. I have rarely come across writing that is as urgent and beautifully expressed. What makes Kendzior’s writing so truly important is [that] it . . . documents where the problem lies, by somebody who lives there.”—The Wire “Sarah Kendzior is as harsh and tenacious a critic of the Trump administration as you’ll find. She isn’t some new kid on the political block or a controversy machine. . . .Rather she is a widely published journalist and anthropologist who has spent much of her life studying authoritarianism.” —Columbia Tribune

Midland

Author: Michael Croley
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982147784
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Leading journalists between the coasts offer perspectives on immigration, drug addiction, climate change, and more that you won’t find in national mainstream media. After the 2016 presidential election, the national media fretted over what they could have missed in the middle of the country, launching a thousand think pieces about so-called “Trump Country.” Yet in 2020, the polling was way off—again. Journalists between the coasts could only shake their heads at the persistence of the false narratives around the communities where they lived and worked. Contributor Ted Genoways foresaw how close the election in 2016 would be and, in its aftermath, put out a public call on Facebook, calling on writers from those midland states to help answer the national media’s puzzlement. Representing a true cross-section of America, both geographically and ethnically, these writers highlight the diversity of the American experience in essays and articles that tell the hidden local truths behind the national headlines. For instance: -Esther Honig describes the effects of the immigration crackdown in Colorado -C.J. Janovy writes about the challenges of being an LGBTQ+ activist in Kansas -Karen Coates and Valeria Fernández show us the children harvesting our food -And Sydney Boles chronicles a miner’s protest in Kentucky. For readers willing to look at the American experience that the pundits don’t know about or cover, Midland is an invaluable peek into the hearts and minds of largely unheard Americans.

Flyover Country

Author: Christopher Harper
Publisher: Government Institutes
ISBN: 0761853332
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 159

Book Description
Flyover Country focuses on a group of baby boomers who graduated from high school in 1969 in the Midwest before setting off into the world in a time of turbulence to fight in Vietnam, to protest against that war, to find jobs, to have families, and to live lives throughout the United States and overseas. Many of these people have made significant contributions to their communities as business owners, doctors, lawyers, ministers, politicians, and teachers. Many have suffered through tough times, losing their way due to alcohol or drugs or facing family crises from divorce to the death of a spouse or a child. The story also is Harper's story. It is the story of a kid from flyover country who used what he learned in the Midwest to travel throughout the world as a journalist and then as a college professor to try to teach those lessons to his students.

Flyover Lives

Author: Diane Johnson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698137485
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
“[A] vivid . . . quest for roots. . . . Splendid.” —The New York Times Book Review Growing up in the small river town of Moline, Illinois, Diane Johnson always dreamed of venturing off to see the world—and did. Now having traveled widely and lived part-time in Paris for many years, she is stung when a French friend teases her about Americans’ indifference to history. Could it be true? The j’accuse haunts Diane and inspires her to dig into her family’s past, working back from the Friday night football of her youth to the adventures illuminated in the letters and memoirs of her stalwart pioneer ancestors—beginning with a lonely young soldier who came to America from France in 1711. As enchanting as her bestselling novels, Flyover Lives is a moving examination of identity and the “wispy but material” family ghosts who shape us. As Johnson pays tribute to her deep Midwestern roots, she captures the perpetual tug-of-war between the magnetic pull of home and our lust for escape and self-invention.

Flyover Country

Author: Austin Smith
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691181578
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 128

Book Description
A new collection about violence and the rural Midwest from a poet whose first book was hailed as “memorable” (Stephanie Burt, Yale Review) and “impressive” (Chicago Tribune) Flyover Country is a powerful collection of poems about violence: the violence we do to the land, to animals, to refugees, to the people of distant countries, and to one another. Drawing on memories of his childhood on a dairy farm in Illinois, Austin Smith explores the beauty and cruelty of rural life, challenging the idea that the American Midwest is mere “flyover country,” a place that deserves passing over. At the same time, the collection suggests that America itself has become a flyover country, carrying out drone strikes and surveillance abroad, locked in a state of perpetual war that Americans seem helpless to stop. In these poems, midwestern barns and farmhouses are linked to other lands and times as if by psychic tunnels. A poem about a barn cat moving her kittens in the night because they have been discovered by a group of boys resonates with a poem about the house in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis. A poem beginning with a boy on a farmhouse porch idly swatting flies ends with the image of people fleeing before a drone strike. A poem about a barbwire fence suggests, if only metaphorically, the debate over immigration and borders. Though at times a dark book, the collection closes with a poem titled “The Light at the End,” suggesting the possibility of redemption and forgiveness. Building on Smith’s reputation as an accessible and inventive poet with deep insights about rural America, Flyover Country also draws profound connections between the Midwest and the wider world.

Interior States

Author: Meghan O'Gieblyn
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385543840
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
Winner of The Believer Book Award for Nonfiction "Meghan O'Gieblyn's deep and searching essays are written with a precise sort of skepticism and a slight ache in the heart. A first-rate and riveting collection." --Lorrie Moore A fresh, acute, and even profound collection that centers around two core (and related) issues of American identity: faith, in general and the specific forms Christianity takes in particular; and the challenges of living in the Midwest when culture is felt to be elsewhere. What does it mean to be a believing Christian and a Midwesterner in an increasingly secular America where the cultural capital is retreating to both coasts? The critic and essayist Meghan O'Gieblyn was born into an evangelical family, attended the famed Moody Bible Institute in Chicago for a time before she had a crisis of belief, and still lives in the Midwest, aka "Flyover Country." She writes of her "existential dizziness, a sense that the rest of the world is moving while you remain still," and that rich sense of ambivalence and internal division inform the fifteen superbly thoughtful and ironic essays in this collection. The subjects of these essays range from the rebranding (as it were) of Hell in contemporary Christian culture ("Hell"), a theme park devoted to the concept of intelligent design ("Species of Origin"), the paradoxes of Christian Rock ("Sniffing Glue"), Henry Ford's reconstructed pioneer town of Greenfield Village and its mixed messages ("Midwest World"), and the strange convergences of Christian eschatology and the digital so-called Singularity ("Ghosts in the Cloud"). Meghan O'Gieblyn stands in relation to her native Midwest as Joan Didion stands in relation to California - which is to say a whole-hearted lover, albeit one riven with ambivalence at the same time.

A Visit from the Goon Squad

Author: Jennifer Egan
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307593622
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER • With music pulsing on every page, this startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption “features characters about whom you come to care deeply as you watch them doing things they shouldn't, acting gloriously, infuriatingly human” (The Chicago Tribune). One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. “Pitch perfect.... Darkly, rippingly funny.... Egan possesses a satirist’s eye and a romance novelist’s heart.” —The New York Times Book Review

Flyover Nation

Author: Dana Loesch
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0399563881
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
"Blaze TV and ... radio host Dana Loesch [posits] that the biggest political problem today is that the people who run this country have no idea what life is really like for ordinary Americans. In fact, they have contempt for the very people they claim to represent ... [and there's a] growing disconnect between the government and media elites and the rest of us, the old-fashioned, hard-working, God-fearing Americans who are proud to live in middle America"--Amazon.com.

Hiding in Plain Sight

Author: Sarah Kendzior
Publisher: Flatiron Books
ISBN: 1250245397
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
Instant New York Times Bestseller Washington Post Bestseller USA Today Bestseller Indie Bound Bestseller Authors Round the South Bestseller Midwest Indie Bestseller New York Times bestselling author Sarah Kendzior documents the truth about the calculated rise to power of Donald Trump since the 1980s and how the erosion of our liberties made an American demagogue possible. The story of Donald Trump’s rise to power is the story of a buried American history – buried because people in power liked it that way. It was visible without being seen, influential without being named, ubiquitous without being overt. Sarah Kendzior’s Hiding in Plain Sight pulls back the veil on a history spanning decades, a history of an American autocrat in the making. In doing so, she reveals the inherent fragility of American democracy – how our continual loss of freedom, the rise of consolidated corruption, and the secrets behind a burgeoning autocratic United States have been hiding in plain sight for decades. In Kendzior’s signature and celebrated style, she expertly outlines Trump’s meteoric rise from the 1980s until today, interlinking key moments of his life with the degradation of the American political system and the continual erosion of our civil liberties by foreign powers. Kendzior also offers a never-before-seen look at her lifelong tendency to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – living in New York through 9/11 and in St. Louis during the Ferguson uprising, and researching media and authoritarianism when Trump emerged using the same tactics as the post-Soviet dictatorships she had long studied. It is a terrible feeling to sense a threat coming, but it is worse when we let apathy, doubt, and fear prevent us from preparing ourselves. Hiding in Plain Sight confronts the injustice we have too long ignored because the truth is the only way forward.

Wide-Open Town

Author: Diane Mutti Burke
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700627065
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
Kansas City is often seen as a mild-mannered metropolis in the heart of flyover country. But a closer look tells a different story, one with roots in the city’s complicated and colorful past. The decades between World Wars I and II were a time of intense political, social, and economic change—for Kansas City, as for the nation as a whole. In exploring this city at the literal and cultural crossroads of America, Wide-Open Town maps the myriad ways in which Kansas City reflected and helped shape the narrative of a nation undergoing an epochal transformation. During the interwar period, political boss Tom Pendergast reigned, and Kansas City was said to be “wide open.” Prohibition was rarely enforced, the mob was ascendant, and urban vice was rampant. But in a community divided by the hard lines of race and class, this “openness” also allowed many of the city’s residents to challenge conventional social boundaries—and it is this intersection and disruption of cultural norms that interests the authors of Wide-Open Town. Writing from a variety of disciplines and viewpoints, the contributors take up topics ranging from the 1928 Republican National Convention to organizing the garment industry, from the stockyards to health care, drag shows, Thomas Hart Benton, and, of course, jazz. Their essays bring to light the diverse histories of the city—among, for instance, Mexican immigrants, African Americans, the working class, and the LGBT community before the advent of “LGBT.” Wide-Open Town captures the defining moments of a society rocked by World War I, the mass migration of people of color into cities, the entrance of women into the labor force and politics, Prohibition, economic collapse, and a revolution in social mores. Revealing how these changes influenced Kansas City—and how the city responded—this volume helps us understand nothing less than how citizens of the age adapted to the rise of modern America.