The Distance from Slaughter County
Lessons from Flyover Country
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
As a soldier and civilian, Steven Moore has traveled from the American Midwest to Afghanistan and beyond. In those travels, he’s seen what place can mean, specifically rural places, and how it follows us, changes us. What Moore has to say about rural places speaks to anyone who has driven a lonely road at night, with nothing but darkness as a cushion between them and the emptiness that surrounds. Place and how we define it—and how it defines us—is a through line throughout the collection of eleven essays. Moore writes about where we come from and the disconnection we often feel between each other: between veterans and nonveterans, between people of different political beliefs, between regions, between eras. These pieces build into a contemplative whole, one that is a powerful meditation on why where we come from means something and how we'll always bring where we are with us, no matter where we go.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Memoirist Moore (The Longer We Were There) offers a series of impressionistic essays on the culture and history of middle America. A native Iowan who now lives in Corvallis, Ore., Moore mixes insider and outsider perspectives, challenging simplistic notions of Midwestern life with philosophical musings, tidbits of Iowa history, and autobiographical anecdotes. He explains Midwesterners' famous obsession with the weather by citing journal entries written by his wife's great-grandmother, who knew that her environment was "so unpredictably violent it destroy a year of crops, or a day of work, or a grainery." In the most effective piece, Moore interweaves the history of his family's ownership of a local gas station since the 1960s—and the feelings provoked by its rebranding from Amoco to BP—with a profile of journalist Ida Tarbell, whose 1904 book The History of the Standard Oil Company spurred a congressional investigation that resulted in the monopoly's dissolution. Elsewhere, Moore reflects on his years of military service, including a deployment to Afghanistan; his complicated feelings toward country music; and America's increasing polarization. Though some pieces are more sketched out than fully formed, Moore incisively catalogs the ironies and complexities of the Midwest. It's a subtle yet effective eye-opener.
