Midwest Futures

I'm one of the few members of our staff who is not from the Midwest, but the region's allegedly bland mysteries are a draw to me as well. The mystery starts with the region itself (does South Dakota count? Pittsburgh? Missouri?), but Christman, a Michigan working-class native turned Michigan academic, wisely doesn't try to unravel a single answer, choosing instead to ravel a whole host of threads—political, literary, geographic, natural—together in a thought-provoking tangle. The most convincing case he makes is that our "Heartland," often claimed as the site of American authenticity, is built on ideas and abstractions, not the least of which were the grids America's frontier planners used to make sense of the land they were taking over, a grid wittily mimicked by the structure of his book.