Before even mentioning her Midwestern roots in the first chapter of this memoir, Andersen compares the events in Anna Karenina
to a train-related suicide in her current Massachusetts hometown, musing on Tolstoy's love/hate relationship with his family estate, and his religious conversion, flight from home and subsequent death at a train station. These themes—home, trains, exile, Christianity—run throughout Andersen's book, and the author, a journalist from a family of newspaper people, skillfully unites them with a voice both vulnerably personal and insightfully far-ranging. In vivid recollections of childhood (which could stand on their own), she recalls the security and smugness of living in a tiny farm town "too far away" for anything to happen; her parents' struggles running a smalltown newspaper; the wonder of rising in the cold of night to catch the train to Minneapolis for Christmas shopping; the Midwestern determination of a local horticulturist to travel the world to find plants that could survive South Dakota's extreme climate; and Andersen's odyssey through crowded, cropless Northeastern regions. Although occasionally indulging in heartland-centric generalizations ("the Midwest has long been the imaginary home of all Americans"), this is an enlightening, moving rhapsody on the spirit of place and the meaning of home. (Jan.)
