NEW YORK TIMES and MIBA BESTSELLER From the St. Louis–based journalist often credited with first predicting Donald Trump’s presidential victory. "A collection of sharp-edged, humanistic pieces about the American heartland...Passionate pieces that repeatedly assail the inability of many to empathize and to humanize." — Kirkus In 2015, Sarah Kendzior collected the essays she reported for Al Jazeera and published them as The View from Flyover Country, which became an ebook bestseller and garnered praise from readers around the world. Now, The View from Flyover Country is being released in print with an updated introduction and epilogue that reflect on the ways that the Trump presidency was the certain result of the realities first captured in Kendzior’s essays. A clear-eyed account of the realities of life in America’s overlooked heartland, The View from Flyover Country is a piercing critique of the labor exploitation, race relations, gentrification, media bias, and other aspects of the post-employment economy that gave rise to a president who rules like an autocrat. The View from Flyover Country is necessary reading for anyone who believes that the only way for America to fix its problems is to first discuss them with honesty and compassion. “Please put everything aside and try to get ahold of Sarah Kendzior’s collected essays, The View from Flyover Country. I have rarely come across writing that is as urgent and beautifully expressed. What makes Kendzior’s writing so truly important is [that] it . . . documents where the problem lies, by somebody who lives there.”—The Wire “Sarah Kendzior is as harsh and tenacious a critic of the Trump administration as you’ll find. She isn’t some new kid on the political block or a controversy machine. . . .Rather she is a widely published journalist and anthropologist who has spent much of her life studying authoritarianism.” —Columbia Tribune

“[A] vivid . . . quest for roots. . . . Splendid.” —The New York Times Book Review Growing up in the small river town of Moline, Illinois, Diane Johnson always dreamed of venturing off to see the world—and did. Now having traveled widely and lived part-time in Paris for many years, she is stung when a French friend teases her about Americans’ indifference to history. Could it be true? The j’accuse haunts Diane and inspires her to dig into her family’s past, working back from the Friday night football of her youth to the adventures illuminated in the letters and memoirs of her stalwart pioneer ancestors—beginning with a lonely young soldier who came to America from France in 1711. As enchanting as her bestselling novels, Flyover Lives is a moving examination of identity and the “wispy but material” family ghosts who shape us. As Johnson pays tribute to her deep Midwestern roots, she captures the perpetual tug-of-war between the magnetic pull of home and our lust for escape and self-invention.

"Blaze TV and ... radio host Dana Loesch [posits] that the biggest political problem today is that the people who run this country have no idea what life is really like for ordinary Americans. In fact, they have contempt for the very people they claim to represent ... [and there's a] growing disconnect between the government and media elites and the rest of us, the old-fashioned, hard-working, God-fearing Americans who are proud to live in middle America"--Amazon.com.

Winner of The Believer Book Award for Nonfiction "Meghan O'Gieblyn's deep and searching essays are written with a precise sort of skepticism and a slight ache in the heart. A first-rate and riveting collection." --Lorrie Moore A fresh, acute, and even profound collection that centers around two core (and related) issues of American identity: faith, in general and the specific forms Christianity takes in particular; and the challenges of living in the Midwest when culture is felt to be elsewhere. What does it mean to be a believing Christian and a Midwesterner in an increasingly secular America where the cultural capital is retreating to both coasts? The critic and essayist Meghan O'Gieblyn was born into an evangelical family, attended the famed Moody Bible Institute in Chicago for a time before she had a crisis of belief, and still lives in the Midwest, aka "Flyover Country." She writes of her "existential dizziness, a sense that the rest of the world is moving while you remain still," and that rich sense of ambivalence and internal division inform the fifteen superbly thoughtful and ironic essays in this collection. The subjects of these essays range from the rebranding (as it were) of Hell in contemporary Christian culture ("Hell"), a theme park devoted to the concept of intelligent design ("Species of Origin"), the paradoxes of Christian Rock ("Sniffing Glue"), Henry Ford's reconstructed pioneer town of Greenfield Village and its mixed messages ("Midwest World"), and the strange convergences of Christian eschatology and the digital so-called Singularity ("Ghosts in the Cloud"). Meghan O'Gieblyn stands in relation to her native Midwest as Joan Didion stands in relation to California - which is to say a whole-hearted lover, albeit one riven with ambivalence at the same time.

Leading journalists between the coasts offer perspectives on immigration, drug addiction, climate change, and more that you won’t find in national mainstream media. After the 2016 presidential election, the national media fretted over what they could have missed in the middle of the country, launching a thousand think pieces about so-called “Trump Country.” Yet in 2020, the polling was way off—again. Journalists between the coasts could only shake their heads at the persistence of the false narratives around the communities where they lived and worked. Contributor Ted Genoways foresaw how close the election in 2016 would be and, in its aftermath, put out a public call on Facebook, calling on writers from those midland states to help answer the national media’s puzzlement. Representing a true cross-section of America, both geographically and ethnically, these writers highlight the diversity of the American experience in essays and articles that tell the hidden local truths behind the national headlines. For instance: -Esther Honig describes the effects of the immigration crackdown in Colorado -C.J. Janovy writes about the challenges of being an LGBTQ+ activist in Kansas -Karen Coates and Valeria Fernández show us the children harvesting our food -And Sydney Boles chronicles a miner’s protest in Kentucky. For readers willing to look at the American experience that the pundits don’t know about or cover, Midland is an invaluable peek into the hearts and minds of largely unheard Americans.

Flyover Country focuses on a group of baby boomers who graduated from high school in 1969 in the Midwest before setting off into the world in a time of turbulence to fight in Vietnam, to protest against that war, to find jobs, to have families, and to live lives throughout the United States and overseas. Many of these people have made significant contributions to their communities as business owners, doctors, lawyers, ministers, politicians, and teachers. Many have suffered through tough times, losing their way due to alcohol or drugs or facing family crises from divorce to the death of a spouse or a child. The story also is Harper's story. It is the story of a kid from flyover country who used what he learned in the Midwest to travel throughout the world as a journalist and then as a college professor to try to teach those lessons to his students.