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Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America Paperback – February 5, 2019
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For five years, James and Deborah Fallows have travelled across America in a single-engine prop airplane. Visiting dozens of towns, the America they saw is acutely conscious of its problems—from economic dislocation to the opioid scourge—but it is also crafting solutions, with a practical-minded determination at dramatic odds with the bitter paralysis of national politics. At times of dysfunction on a national level, reform possibilities have often arisen from the local level. The Fallowses describe America in the middle of one of these creative waves.
Their view of the country is as complex and contradictory as America itself, but it also reflects the energy, the generosity and compassion, the dreams, and the determination of many who are in the midst of making things better. Our Towns is the story of their journey—and an account of a country busy remaking itself.
- Print length432 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherKnopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Publication dateFebruary 5, 2019
- Dimensions5.19 x 0.98 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100525432442
- ISBN-13978-0525432449
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"A tonic of a book about the can-do America unready to succumb to rot."—Roger Cohen, The New York Times
“I’ve been waiting for this book for years. . . . Buy this book. . . . This country is more united than divided...and this book will prove it.”—Joe Scarborough, co-host of Morning Joe on MSNBC
“Knowing the Fallows and their work, I assumed this new co-authored book of theirs would be typically savvy, sensitive, articulate and prescient. What I didn't expect was how a record of experiences of current middle American communities, through their lenses, would be such a page turner! I've guessed for many years that real change in this world would be effected by and within small communities—places where people feel connected and capable of impact on some larger scale. Our Towns is a monumental validation of that hypothesis—with real stories and real people, who are really getting things done. James & Deborah—thanks for your journey, your open and honest observations, and helping to shine light for us at the end of many tunnels.” —David Allen, author of Getting Things Done; the Art of Stress-Free Productivity
“Our Towns will become a classic, joining the ranks of American odysseys from De Tocqueville to Dos Passos. The landscape unfurls beneath us; the language of different regions echoes in our ears. Most important, this book is a tonic for what ails us as a nation, a captivating story of energy and renewal across the land.” —Anne-Marie Slaughter, President & CEO, New America
“In the tradition of John Steinbeck and Studs Terkel, the Fallows have crisscrossed the country in search of the extraordinary strength and character of ordinary people and places. What they’ve found—in towns we know and others off the beaten path—should give us all great hope for the future.” —California Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr.
"Reminiscent of Charles Kuralt's On The Road with Charles Kuralt, this unique look at the heart of America will bring hope and insight to readers. Highly recommended."—David Miller, Library Journal
“An illuminating trip through ‘parts of the country generally missed by the media spotlight.’ . . . Writing with lively curiosity and open minds, the couple have created textured portraits of 29 American cities, from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to Allentown, Pennsylvania, and Eastport, Maine, to Redlands, California. . . . A well-reported, optimistic portrait of America’s future.” —Kirkus Reviews
“An eye-opening, keenly optimistic reminder of the strength of America’s vital center.” —Publishers Weekly
About the Author
DEBORAH FALLOWS is a linguist and writer who holds a PhD in theoretical linguistics and is the author of two previous books. She has written for The Atlantic, National Geographic, Slate, The New York Times, and The Washington Monthly, and has worked at the Pew Research Center, Oxygen Media, and Georgetown University. She and her husband have two sons and five grandchildren.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Deborah Fallows
And with that, we were off, flying away from frigid Washington, D.C., and its political postelection turmoil, on a southerly route to California.
We had flown nearly one hundred thousand miles in nearly four years in our small plane, with Jim as pilot and me in the right seat. We began in my home territory of the Upper Midwest, then headed over to Maine and flew south through New England and the Mid-Atlantic states to Georgia and Florida. We swept farther through the Deep South, to Texas and the Southwest, up the Central Valley of California to Oregon and Washington, and closed the loop after leaving Montana. All the while we snaked in and out of the so-called flyover country, through Wyoming, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and much more.
We have landed in dozens of towns and cities along the way, anticipating in each of them local stories that would organize themselves into some kind of composed narrative about the backbone and character of the region and maybe beyond that, to help explain the character of the country. We began by looking for towns with positive energy, with signs of rebound from some kind of shock or shift, like a mine or factory that had closed or waves of people who’d departed or newcomers who’d arrived. We ended up adding towns with down-and-out reputations where we truly feared for what we might find. Life upon landing was never quite what we’d planned.
We have stayed in towns for weeks at a time. We have often revisited them, following threads from one person, or one group or town institution or movement, to the next, settling into the local rhythm. We have gone to town plays and musicals, sat in on civic meetings, hung out at coffee shops and brewpubs, spent days at schools, libraries, and ball games, taken tours of downtowns, visited factories, start-ups, and community college classes, taken boat rides and bike rides, swum in local public pools and run on high school tracks, borrowed cars, and stayed in motels, private homes, and one-off eco-hotels. We remained long enough to begin to imagine how much we didn’t know, but also to appreciate the unusual opportunity we’ve had, in seeing a broader sampling of modern America’s realities than most of its citizens will ever have a chance to do. …
*
I’m not a pilot, which is often an uncomfortable admission. I don’t share the zealous passion for flying that I have seen in most pilots, and my eyesight has always been, well, wanting. If Jim says, “Do you see the runway?,” I’ll mumble something in return. But after a thousand hours of being in the right seat, I know a lot about flying the plane. I know its repertoire of gurgles and agitations as well as I knew those of our infant children. I am very familiar with the gauges, navigation, radio work with ATC, steering the plane, and I know how to pull the parachute, which deploys from the fuselage and settles the plane in a true emergency. The parachute of the Cirrus, now the best-selling small aircraft in the world, eliminates night-before-flight worries for me.
We stopped in Las Cruces in search of cheap fuel and a late-afternoon lunch. We never knew what kind of food we would find. Many times, vending-machine peanut butter crackers were the best we could do. I worried about this a lot in our early days. Our go-to provisions were a cool sack with dried fruit, nuts, granola bars, carrots, hummus, grapes, cheese, Vitaminwater—you get the picture. Over time, the list became leaner and leaner. By now, more than three years later, we’d actually become aficionados of jerky: beef, buffalo, reindeer, elk, spicy, lime- ginger, teriyaki. One Uber driver who drove us on an unscheduled stop in Wyoming went on for twenty minutes with stories about his homemade jerky from a personal drying machine. When lunch in Las Cruces didn’t work out, jerky it was.
We pressed on for another hour or so to Tucson. The mountains deflated into undulating brown hills. We flew over flatlands with occasional volcanic outcroppings and long stretches of almost surreal desert landscapes that looked like pointillist paintings…
As we flew over Palm Springs, the aerial road signs were becoming familiar: the mountains north and south, the desert settlements below, the wind farms, the Banning Pass through to the Los Angeles basin. We flew over Redlands, our destination, to San Bernardino and the long, wide runways that had once accommodated B-52s when this site was Norton Air Force Base. Jim guided our Cirrus in, hovering near touchdown in the wind gusts for the final few hundred feet.
*
Landed. What were we supposed to feel now, some twenty-five hundred miles and four days later? Or one hundred thousand miles and four years later? Maybe like Mark Twain, I thought, one of the writers whose account of an epic journey I had read. At the end of twenty days by stagecoach, the Washoe Zephyr, from Missouri to the territory of Nevada, Twain wrote, “It had been a fine pleasure trip; we had fed fat on wonders every day; we were now well accustomed to stage life, and very fond of it; so the idea of coming to a stand-still in a village was not agreeable, but on the contrary depressing.”
We, too, had indeed “fed fat on wonders every day.” Our ending didn’t feel as sad as Twain described his, but he was young then and didn’t understand yet that you can craft many adventures in a lifetime. I knew we would head on to many more adventures, and that this ending was, again, another beginning.
###
Charleston, WV
James Fallows
Mountain Stage is the main national-media production coming out of West Virginia, and it has been a significant force in country music. It was carried by 150 stations nationwide at the time of our visit, and in the next two years it expanded to 200. The list of artists who had their first live-broadcast exposure to a national audience under host Larry Groce’s auspices is so long and impressive that at first I didn’t really believe it (but then I checked it out).
We got to see a live Mountain Stage performance at the Civic Center in downtown Charleston, before an enthusiastic and youngish full-house crowd.
A few days after the show, we went to see Groce and his family at their house, both to ask him about the program’s history but also because his name frequently came up when we asked people in Charleston, “Who makes this town go?”
West Virginia in general and the Kanawha Valley region around Charleston are, of course, places where not enough has gone right for quite a long time. The coal industry has inevitably shrunk and is shrinking further; the big processing works that once gave the area the name “Chemical Valley” are mainly gone.
So what was it like to run a recording career from here? And to produce a national radio show from a state usually the object of condescension from coastal big-city tastemakers? Two themes ran through what Groce told us.
One was about the possibilities and challenges of doing first-tier creative work in what the world considers second- or third-tier locations. This, obviously, was a major theme through all of our travels. Whether they come out and say it or not, many of the country’s most ambitious people assume that work of a certain level requires being in a certain place.
This idea of a vast national sorting system for talent has huge ramifications. They range from politics to the distortion of real estate prices in a handful of coastal big cities. But as we continued to find, in countless other places across the country, people don’t have to start out assuming that most of what they take home will immediately go out for the rent or mortgage. This is because they have calculated that—in Duluth and Greenville or any of dozens of other places, they can build their company, pursue their ambition, and realize their dream without crowding into the biggest cities.
As for Larry Groce, when he first got to West Virginia, he said he found it comfortable, because “the way people here looked, acted, and even sounded” reminded him of his grandparents’ and great-aunts’ generation in Texas. Which made sense, since many Texans of that era had migrated from Appalachia. As he stayed, he came to appreciate its practicality, its lack of pretension, and its person-to-person level of generosity.
Practicality: “It’s one of those places that has never had a boom, so booms and busts are relative. If you’re never up, you can’t be down.”
Lack of pretension: “Lots of people can make an album in the studio who can’t do it live.” (Mountain Stage is recorded before a live audience.) “That is very West Virginia, too: to deliver in person. We have hillbillies, but we’ll tell you what a hillbilly is—you [outsiders] don’t tell us.” This was two years before J. D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy made the term a staple of political conversation. “A hillbilly isn’t an ignorant fool. He’s a straightforward, self-effacing, ‘what you see is what you get’ person. He relies on his friends because he doesn’t trust a lot of other things. He is not necessarily formally educated. But he is smart.”
Generosity: “If your car gets broken down, you want it to happen in West Virginia. This whole stuff about Deliverance, it’s just the opposite. If something happens, you want it to happen here. People will stop and help.”
Groce told the story of a national network correspondent who came to interview people nearby and found them unwilling to answer questions. So he put up the hood of his car as if he were having engine trouble, and people came over to help him out and talk with him.
Groce seemed content with and proud of his show and its cultural reach, but he was fully aware that “since it is a national show, we have felt stereotypes people have about West Virginia.”
He said, “One thing I’ve learned over the years, when you put ‘Mountain’ in the title of something, people think you’re the fiddle-and-banjo show. Which we’re not. Of course, if we were just an old-timey bluegrass country show, we’d probably get more national press, since we’d fit expectations.
“We see the expectations in the stories that are generated about this place. Have a mine disaster?
The reporters are all here. Have a chemical spill? All here. Have something where it shows that some percentage of the children are poor or obese? Yes. But if you have Gabriel Kahane and Kate Miller-Heidke on one show, and then James McMurtry, it doesn’t fit the categories, doesn’t make sense.”
If I am making Groce sound defensive in recounting this, I’m misrepresenting him. His tone was like that of a politician who understands, anthropologist-style, that the press simply can’t help concentrating on elections rather than governing but nonetheless realizes that his or her job comes down to governing.
And the second theme Larry Groce reminded us of, beyond his insistence on the potential for the first-rate from this locale? His sense that West Virginia and Charleston, for all their travails, were moving in the right, rather than the wrong, direction.
“Lots of people who are older are looking backward,” he said. “people can get stuck in ‘I remember when. . . .’ Coal is dying, but it’s like a dangerous animal that’s dying. It’s going to thrash.”
However, he said, younger people, as well as those from elsewhere, didn’t have that memory. They were starting new businesses and families and projects. “I think in the last ten years there has been a renaissance,” he said. “It’s easy to go to a place because the money is good. It’s different because you like being there. I am optimistic about this place.”
Product details
- Publisher : Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group; Reprint edition (February 5, 2019)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 432 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0525432442
- ISBN-13 : 978-0525432449
- Item Weight : 10.5 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.19 x 0.98 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #129,034 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #55 in Sociology of Rural Areas
- #437 in Cultural Anthropology (Books)
- #1,178 in Sociology Reference
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Customers find the book insightful and interesting, providing them with information about the real America. They describe it as an easy, enjoyable read with well-written content. However, some readers feel the book becomes repetitive after a while, turning a good idea into a tedious slog.
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Customers find the book insightful and entertaining, providing an interesting look at America. They appreciate the thoughtful and clear-eyed views on American cities and towns. The book provides creative ideas and uplifting accounts of can-do ingenuity. Readers also mention that the writing is good and the details are interesting.
"...And if you care about our country and our people, it is truly inspirational." Read more
"...a realistic assessment of what went wrong; the energy and creativity in educational institutions, appreciation of quality of life factors, the..." Read more
"If you like hearing about interesting small town history this is your book...." Read more
"...The writing is good and the details are interesting...." Read more
Customers find the book engaging and interesting. They enjoy reading it from start to finish, finding it entertaining and clear-eyed. The concluding chapter is praised as excellent. Overall, readers recommend the book for government officials, city leaders, and entrepreneurs.
"...This book is interesting throughout if you care about how people in other places live...." Read more
"...contacts and depths of travel, insight, and thought made this an enjoyable book...." Read more
"...In all, however, a good and uplifting read!" Read more
"...So too is the excellent concluding chapter which sums up the common characteristics that are underwriting success in the towns studied...." Read more
Customers praise the book's writing quality. They find it well-written and timely. The writers are praised for their positive attitude and positive outlook. The paperback seems well-printed, and the book is an easy read with thorough research.
"...The writing is good and the details are interesting...." Read more
"...which sums up the common characteristics that are underwriting success in the towns studied...." Read more
"...Self-absorbed authors and somnambulent prose, I had to quit at the 1/3 mark. Any more and I felt I was wasting my life...." Read more
"This is a very thoughtful, very well-written exploration of the positive developments happening all over the country that escape the attention of..." Read more
Customers find the book repetitive and tedious after a while. They describe it as boring and disjointed.
"...Frankly, the book often becomes tedious. The picture of many community leaders is often two dimensional...." Read more
"...My only negative reaction Is that the book gets a bit repetitive, because they found pretty much the same types of community activism at work in..." Read more
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"...After a while, the stories do get a bit repetitive." Read more
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2019The authors are regular contributors to the Atlantic. This book grew out of an idea -- to learn how people in small-to-medium sized towns can rebuild/reinvent their communities if they are willing to separate themselves from the polarized world of national politics. The places they study are in red and blue states, have red and blue ideas, but mostly have leaders that don't think in red and blue. They visited several dozen towns throughout the US, spent several weeks in each, getting to know the town, what is happening to give them new life. The calamities can be the closing of factories, the loss of a military base, the end of an industry that caused the town to be there in the first place. The end of coal mining in some towns, the end of logging or fishing in others, as those natural resources have been either worked out or are no longer competitive. Shopping centers and strip malls lead to the destruction of downtown businesses.
There are many examples of public/private partnerships, nearly all where the owner of a large company decides to "give back" to the community. Where people who grew up there, left for school, worked for a while somewhere else, and returned home. The unifying theme is that natural leaders (sometimes elected, but often not) take the bull by the horns and develop things that put the town back on a growth track. A coffee house, a brew pub, innovative schools that teach what people need to know for the new economy, help for immigrants (many of the towns studied have strongly benefited from immigrants, who often replace locals who have moved away). In more than a few of these towns, there was a leader who introduced the concept of developing hubs for technical and business innovation -- everything from facilitating business startups, to welcoming scientists and computer programmers to develop software that can be used by the local or regional economy. In Fresno, for example, someone is thinking about software apps to help the farmers in the great Central Valley operate more efficiently.
This book is interesting throughout if you care about how people in other places live. I've travelled quite a bit, but I often found myself looking up places on the map. And if you care about our country and our people, it is truly inspirational.
- Reviewed in the United States on July 26, 2018You can look up at the night sky and get a good picture of what all those suns looked like millions and millions of years ago. If you visited a city 10, 20 or 30 years ago, your impression of the place might be equally dated. James and Deborah Fallows undertook a "100,000+' mile journey around America for three or four years examining where there might be some positive directions in places that had been hit hard by economic tidal waves, shifting demographics and/or other phenomena that were beyond their control. Despite massive dysfunction in national politics, they have found considerable evidence of growth and optimism, laced with hard work.
Some common denominators were a realistic assessment of what went wrong; the energy and creativity in educational institutions, appreciation of quality of life factors, the welcoming and contribution of new immigrants; the focus on getting a few things right with a new direction and majority community participation.
Frankly, the book often becomes tedious. The picture of many community leaders is often two dimensional. One can only appreciate so many references to swimming pools and elementary schools. Their affection for small airports and brew pubs may or may not resonate. But the patient. disciplined and contrasting window on places that don't get a lot of positive press coverage is worthwhile. In my prior life, I spent weeks in random places (wherever my company was involved in serious litigation). I nearly always came away with a respect, and sometimes an affection, for places I would rarely have sought out on my own. It's good to know there is still a lot of constructive energy in many small cities and towns in Middle America.
- Reviewed in the United States on November 26, 2024If you like hearing about interesting small town history this is your book. It is especially helpful if you travel and want to see some "non touristy" places in average towns throughout the US
- Reviewed in the United States on September 26, 2018This book is written by a man and woman, professional journalists, who fly a plane to scads of smaller American cities and, presumeably, give an objective view of the quality of life in each city. The writing is good and the details are interesting. I'm about 75% through the book, and I'm growing weary of unflagging optimism about the future of the communities. It's almost as if the Chambers of Commerce had paid for promotional space. There's at least one hero or heroine in each city that is devoting life to making all things better. There are two communities yet to read about with which I'm very familiar, and, in fact, I bought the book to see what's said about them. I'll render final judgment after that. Meanwhile, I'll try to overlook the grins and fist pumping.
- Reviewed in the United States on October 15, 2024The book was a gift and it was delivered quickly
- Reviewed in the United States on April 10, 2024The contacts and depths of travel, insight, and thought made this an enjoyable book. It will be used years from now to remember how the time was when they visited.
- Reviewed in the United States on August 19, 2018I enjoyed reading about the Fallows‘ exploration of American towns and small cities. They make an interesting point about local community spirit overcoming national political divisiveness. My only negative reaction Is that the book gets a bit repetitive, because they found pretty much the same types of community activism at work in most of the places they visited and therefore repeat the same observations several times. In all, however, a good and uplifting read!
Top reviews from other countries
- NotlerReviewed in Canada on August 4, 2018
5.0 out of 5 stars A marvelous read.
Doesn't pull punches on the negatives, but essentially explores and highlights very positive local endeavours toward making the USA a successful, functioning entity. From Maine to Mississippi to California, provides numerous examples of people from different backgrounds, with differing political opinions, working together for the betterment of their towns. A marvelous read.
- Elmer Fudd GantryReviewed in Australia on September 12, 2018
5.0 out of 5 stars Hairy premise
None of these towns were mine, 18 stars
- NambuReviewed in Japan on July 1, 2018
5.0 out of 5 stars Deep in the Heart of America Today
James and Deborah Fallows are highly qualified to describe the American experience in small towns across the country, which they covered in their small private plane over a five year period. They usually visited each community once for a general glance, then returned for in-depth interviews and visits to local businesses and organizations after significant preparation. The Fallows team has lived and written in many parts of the world, including Japan and China, and across the U.S. and they are both balanced and insightful. An excellent read for anyone interested in what makes America work today, on a local level.