Description: A "piercing, unsentimental" (New Yorker) history that boldly challenges the idea of a rural American crisis.
It seems everyone has an opinion about rural America. Is it gripped in a tragic decline? Or is it on the cusp of a glorious revival? Is it the key to understanding America today? Steven Conn argues that we're missing the real question: Is rural America even a thing? No, says Conn, who believes we see only what we want to see in the lands beyond the suburbs--fantasies about moral (or backward) communities, simpler (or repressive) living, and what it means to be authentically (or wrongheadedly) American. If we want to build a better future, Conn argues, we must accept that these visions don't exist and never did. In The Lies of the Land, Conn shows that rural America--so often characterized as in crisis or in danger of being left behind--has actually been at the center of modern American history, shaped by the same forces as everywhere else in the country: militarization, industrialization, corporatization, and suburbanization. Examining each of these forces in turn, Conn invites us to dispense with the lies and half-truths we've believed about rural America and to pursue better solutions to the very real challenges shared all across our nation.Brief description: Steven Conn is the W. E. Smith Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is the author of many books, most recently Nothing Succeeds Like Failure: The Sad History of American Business Schools.
Review Quotes: "[Conn's] witty and lucid prose will appeal to those seeking a jargon-free discussion of rural America, and his claims will provoke dialogue about the paradoxes of rural life. Conn is deft at exploring paradoxes in urban and American history."-- "Journal of Cultural Geography"