A Prodigal Search for Self and the South

A Prodigal Search for Self and the South

Where I Come From: Stories from the Deep South By Rick Bragg. Knopf, 2020. Hardcover, 256 pages, $26.95 Reviewed by Owen Edwards Where I Come From by Rick Bragg was published a few months before Uprooted by Grace Olmstead, and has strong resonances with it. Bragg’s...
Skiing Alta with WFB

Skiing Alta with WFB

William F. Meehan III ‘Alta’ isn’t a word you hear often in fashionable conversations in skiing circles … You can live out a casual lifetime, as a casual skier, and not know about Alta, and the odd thing is that this really suits the Alta people just fine. There is...
Making a Home Among Monsters and Martians

Making a Home Among Monsters and Martians

Midwestern Strange: Hunting Monsters, Martians, and the Weird in Flyover Country by B. J. Hollars. University of Nebraska Press, 2019. Paperback, 208 pages, $20. Reviewed by Jacob A. Bruggeman It was around the time of my ninth birthday that I realized the Loch...
The Center Holds

The Center Holds

The Midwestern Moment: The Forgotten World of Early Twentieth Century Midwestern Regionalism, 1880–1940 Edited by Jon K. Lauck. Hastings College Press, 2017. Hardcover, 306 pages, $40. Reviewed by Nicole M. King “The Corn Belt,” “America’s Breadbasket,” “The...

Vandenberg in Full: Babbitt No More

Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century by Hendrik Meijer. University of Chicago Press, 2017. Hardcover, 448 pages, $35. JON K. LAUCK From the Civil War until the World War II era the American Midwest region was central to American life, as...