The heartland, flyover country, the breadbasket of America, the bring-a-casserole-to-the-potluck capital of the world: whatever you call it, Paul Christman's searching, searing essay collection Midwest Futures surveys the past, present and potential of the U.S.'s ill-defined midsection. With wit and an activist's outrage, Christman's debut centers on the question of how the Midwest became what it is, both as a gridded landscape ruled by grain elevators and agribusiness, but also as a persistent (and stubbornly vague!) idea.
Christman, who teaches at Michigan State University, offers an appealing, skeptical guide, busting myths and relishing ironies, such as the one about how a region known for its people's stoic humility also has positioned itself, over the last century, as the purest expression of the very idea of American-ness. In its 36 short essays--each of uniform length and arranged, inside larger chapters, like plats of property within surveyors' rows of land--Midwest Futures offers a clear-eyed look at the region's settlement, development, culture, boom times and downturn. Christman argues that, since it was first divvied up by Congress into ownable parcels in the 1780s, the Midwest has been shaped and ruled not by the hard work of homesteading families but by corporations, large land owners and the brutal logic of capitalism. The futures of the title refers not only to what might be next but also to how the land and its people (including the Native Americans who were there first) have come second to speculative economics. --Alan Scherstuhl, freelance writer and editor