Midwest Futures

by Phil Christman

Overview

“A combination of history, memoir, reportage, and lit-crit that taught me a lot about a region I’ve reported on. . . . Check it out.” ―James Fallows, The Atlantic
 
A Commonweal Notable Book of 2020
Finalist, Midwest Independent Book Award
Winner, Independent Publisher Awards Bronze Medal
 
What does the future hold for the Midwest? A vast stretch of fertile farmland bordering one of the largest concentrations of fresh water in the world, the Midwestern US seems ideally situated for the coming challenges of climate change. But it also sits at the epicenter of a massive economic collapse that many of its citizens are still struggling to overcome.
 
The question of what the Midwest is (and what it will become) is nothing new. As Phil Christman writes in this idiosyncratic new book, ambiguity might be the region’s defining characteristic. Taking a cue from Jefferson’s grid, the famous rectangular survey of the Old Northwest Territory that turned everything from Ohio to Wisconsin into square-mile lots, Christman breaks his exploration of Midwestern identity, past and present, into thirty-six brief, interconnected essays. The result is a sometimes sardonic, often uproarious, and consistently thought-provoking look at a misunderstood place and the people who call it home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948742764
Publisher:	Arcadia Publishing SC
Publication date:	05/01/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	137
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

A former substitute teacher, shelter worker, and home health aide, Phil Christman currently lectures in the English department at University of Michigan. His work has appeared in The Hedgehog Review , Commonweal ,

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Phil Christman is a beautiful writer with a sharp analytical mind. Both are on display in Midwest Futures, a book about culture, identity, space, and place in the American Midwest. As our public discourse reckons with the categorical descriptions of a diverse, changing population, it is more important than ever to have more precise interpretations of which 'we, the people' are being leveraged and for what ends. Midwest Futures reveals the diversity of the region’s people, opinions, and experiences. Christman’s writing, as always, is readable, engaging, and funny as hell, while also maintaining intellectual rigor. You don’t have to be a Midwesterner to feel connected to this book and its people.” —Tressie McMillan Cottom, National Book Award Finalist and author of Thick: And Other Essays

Interviews

“Phil Christman is mapping new territory. He is surveying the intricacies of the forgotten Midwest, and he is an expert guide, taking the reader, grid-by-grid, through a landscape we must know better.” —Jon Lauck, Editor-in-Chief, Middle West Review

Editorial Reviews

"Christman's text is pointed and often very funny as he ponders a subject that has been hiding in plain sight. ... Though much of the tone is dark and acerbic, the author finds glimmers of hope in the region as "a moral frontier," where Americans might best face the considerable challenges of capitalism and climate change. A provocative analysis. You'll never think of Peoria in the same way again." —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2019-12-18
A Midwestern author surveys an amorphous region that resists easy categorization.

According to Christman (English/Univ. of Michigan), everything you think you know about the Midwest is wrong. It isn't as flat as you think, nor as normal and nice. It isn't as white, or as boring, and it isn't as hopeless as its Rust Belt corrosion would seem to indicate. The boundaries of this multistate region are also murky, described with an "antiquated nickname that stuck." As the author notes, the name "Middle West" was initially used to describe Tennessee. In fact, there is no universal agreement on any single state as Midwestern, though Illinois comes closest in consensus. (Even there, those in Chicago tend to consider themselves Chicagoans rather than Midwesterners.) Christman assembles the narrative to resemble a grid, an organization of "six rows containing six prose ‘plats,' each approximately 1,000 words long." Within this orderly construction, there is plenty of disorder, or at least ambiguity, as the author surveys the territory along historical, political, moral, and economic lines. He looks at the Jeffersonian era of the first survey, when the area was the Western frontier, and the transformations wrought by the railroad (and the Underground Railroad), automobile, assembly line, and labor movement. Christman's text is pointed and often very funny as he ponders a subject that has been hiding in plain sight: "The Midwest is, in fact, constantly written about, often in a way that weirdly disclaims the possibility that it has ever been written about before," as writers describe with wonder their "discovery" of great museums, restaurants, literature, and deep cultural resources. Though much of the tone is dark and acerbic, the author finds glimmers of hope in the region as "a moral frontier," where Americans might best face the considerable challenges of capitalism and climate change.

A provocative analysis. You'll never think of Peoria in the same way again.

Kirkus Reviews