Also of interest...in great American places
From Warm Center to Ragged Edge
by Jon K. Lauck (Univ. of Iowa, $27.50)
How did the coastal elite come to think of Midwesterners as yokels? In this scholarly but important book, said Michael Dirda in The Washington Post, historian Jon Lauck traces the cultural split to the 1920s, when writers like Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis turned the heartland’s devotion to family, community, and church into a target of satire. Lauck suggests that Midwestern values could revive citizen engagement in politics, and his argument “deserves to be read and debated.”
Cattle Kingdom
by Christopher Knowlton (Eamon Dolan, $29)
We don’t think of the cowboy as the product of an economic bubble, but that’s who he is in this lively new history, said Stephen Harrigan in The Wall Street Journal. Christopher Knowlton’s character-driven book recounts how speculators from New York to London bet all on the longhorn cattle herded onto the Great Plains shortly after the extermination of bison in the 1870s. Though Cattle Kingdom overworks its case for the bubble’s significance, it “coasts along just fine” on Knowlton’s storytelling skills.
Sunshine State
by Sarah Gerard (Harper Perennial, $16)
Typically when the rest of the nation ponders Florida, the conversation is “more roast than dialogue,” said Nick Moran in TheMillions.com. But Sarah Gerard’s outstanding essay collection resets the terms, giving readers an empathetic portrait of her home state and of the kind of scarred, broken residents who wind up generating tabloid headlines. In “BFF,” which recalls a friend whose life has unraveled, Gerard speaks of the intimacy they once shared “the way an amputee might remember a lost limb.”
The Potlikker Papers
by John T. Edge (Penguin, $28)
John Edge’s history of the modern South as seen through its food culture is “at times spicy,” and “always unsparing in its honesty,” said Jim Ewing in the Jackson, Miss., Clarion- Ledger. The story begins in the kitchen of a civil rights activist whose chicken sandwiches helped sustain leaders of the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. From there, Edge helps show how a tradition of hospitality and the legacy of slavery inform most every Southern meal, and the result is “truly a masterful work.” ■
