The Lies of the Land

Seeing Rural America for What It Is―and Isn’t

By: Steven Conn

Narrated by: Tom Perkins

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.

©2023 The University of Chicago (P)2024 Tantor

necessarily dense, a little number heavy

I'm gonna suggest this guy had the perfect voice for this particular diegesis of American conflicted relationship with growth. I can't imagine it sticking well for anybody the first time through, but it captures such a wide swath of history and implies such a depth of culpability it isn't challenging to look forward to going back through. His voice is just monotone enough to sound like he's reading a line item inventory which a quarter of the time is what the book boils down to. When he pivots into the storytelling he does manage to animate his voice to the purpose of the writing. I lost the thread a few times as to the milestones on the downward slide, but was surprised to learn how longstanding the countryside has been corporatized.