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State By State: A Panoramic Portrait Of America (2008)

by Matt Weiland(Favorite Author)

3.73 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0061470902 (ISBN13: 9780061470905)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Ecco

review 1: A very nice collection of essays, which makes a good introduction both to the 50 states and to a variety of authors. Some of the essays are more historical\travel-style, others more autobiographical, but all are interesting.Lovely quote from the New Hampshire essay by Will Blythe:"In rural New Hampshire, there is a tendency to use words sparingly, as if the supply might run out by spring. This laconicism is sometimes caricatured as countryspeak, the inarticulate parsimony of rubes and rednecks. It strikes me instead as part of a culture of conservation, of saving. A poor person in the sticks never knows when he might need a part from that rusting car in his front yard. Words in New Hampshire are car parts. Words are tools, worn by usage, carefully maintained, stored... more nightly in barns and sheds. Words are not for show (an excess of self-display is contrary to the spirit of farming and Puritan effacement); they're for milking, cutting firewood, digging (how else would one get down to understatement?). Woods are vegetables from the garden, canned and put up in root cellars and kitchen cabinets, to be rationed out over the course of a long winter. Words should approach as closely as possible the condition of silence, honesty being nearly mute." (p. 296)
review 2: This was a good book to read in short snippets (a state or two at a time). Rather than providing an academic look at the details of each state, it presents a short essay or anecdote by an author connected to that state. Worth it to leave on the coffee table to pick up whenever you have a few minutes waiting for your guests to arrive or for the water to boil, but it's definitely one to borrow from the library rather than to buy. less

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