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A Border with No Country: A Review of All the Pretty Horses
“This is still good country. Yeah. I know it is. But it aint my country.… Where is your country? he said. I don’t know, said John Grady. I don’t know where it is. I don’t know what happens to country.” (299) Not counting the movies of Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men, →
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Alabama – The Character – my interview with Virginia Reeves continues – part 2 of 3
Can place be the primary character in a book? You can make the case for that in Virginia Reeves’s debut novel, Work Like Any Other. In the previous segment of this interview, we discussed maintaining hope in strange times. In this segment we talk two great states – Alabama and Montana. Tell me about Alabama because →
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Surviving Strange Days: My Interview with Virginia Reeves begins – part 1 of 3
One of my favorite books of this year has been Work Like Any Other, a debut novel by novelist Virginia Reeves. My review can be found here. The novel is a poignant tale of a man who is imprisoned for tapping into the new electrical lines crossing rural 1920s Alabama, an action that leads to an →
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God and Arson: My interview with Monica Hesse concludes – part 3 of 3
In previous segments of this interview, I talked with Monica Hesse, author of American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land, about her experience of the Eastern Shore and her thoughts about what the 2012-2013 arsons have to say about rural America in general. Today we conclude with some thoughts about the religious life →
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The Richness & The Struggle: My interview with Monica Hesse continues – part 2 of 3
In part 1 of my interview with Monica Hesse, author of American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land, we talked about her experiences of the Eastern Shore, where the arsons explored in the book took place. In this segment of the interview we looked at what the arsons might say about America more →
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A Reporter Comes to the Shore: My interview with Monica Hesse – part 1 of 3
Monica Hesse, an author and reporter for the Washington Post, came to the Shore to write a book about the spate of arsons that took place on the Eastern Shore between 2012 and 2013. That resulted in the bestselling book, American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land, which I recently reviewed on Heartlands. Monica agreed →
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The Relentless Storytelling of Philipp Meyer: A Review of American Rust
Philipp Meyer is a relentless storyteller. By the time he gets through with you, you will have a deep immersion in the place where the story happens and will have met characters who are anything but passive. They are doers who fight and scrape against an unjust world. They make many mistakes, some dreadful, →
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Why Books Will Win
I’m making a wager that books will lead us to the future. Heartlands came about as a desire to understand the present age, particularly from the perspective of rural America and rural church ministry. In the beginning I was trying to figure out why the place where I live seemed suddenly so strange to me. →
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It’s a Howlin’ Shame
Crawling under the skin of the present age is a reality, an anthropology so old that it infests everything we do. I felt it as I read Arlie Russell Hochschild’s sociology of Tea Party Louisiana in Strangers in the Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. But it’s there in liberal moral →
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