The Distance from Slaughter County: Lessons from Flyover Country

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 [could] 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. (Mar.)