Mr. Rhodes' "evocation" is just that - a kindly, affirmative
montage often as open as its expanse of wheat fields, "colorful if
you stand back far enough," and gently underlining the motif of the
"heartland as hideout," as a buffer against urban stress. For the
most part Rhodes' collective portrait is accomplished by shorter
sketches of people and institutions. Among the former, those who
represented its hardscrabble past - Gregg, prairie trader, Mollie
Sanford, pioneer recorder, or Jefferson the first mind to shape the
inland ground. Moving onward, the pariah sign-painter Jesse Howard,
a true American primitive; or Harry Truman - midwestern vigor,
pride and decisiveness; or Eisenhower, a revisionist view here.
Then there's the Unity School of practical Christianity which
represents to faith what Hallmark does to sentiment; or the Lincoln
Foundation; or Paul Engle's Writers' Workshop in Iowa; or Johnson
and Masters' clinic designed to alleviate sexual disability; etc.,
etc. Within the ambit, perhaps nothing you can really isolate as
specifically regional in character except its character, steadying,
enduring, but tire pieces are informative and impressionable in a
higher sense and if you're from Missouri, or iowa, or Kansas, and
have to be shown - a native son's gentle guidance. (Kirkus Reviews)
"The Inland Ground" is Richard Rhodes's first book. It was
published quietly in 1970 to critical acclaim ("The New York Times
Book Review" named it one of the best books of the year) but few
sales. In the two decades that followed, Rhodes published ten more
books, including A Hole in the World, Farm, and The Making of the
Atomic Bomb, for which he won the National Book Award, the National
Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.
Yet, Rhodes contends, some of his best writing is collected
here, in "The Inland Ground," sixteen essays that evoke the Middle
West, on topics that range from coyote hunting to the Mayo Clinic.
For this updated edition Rhodes has chosen the twelve best of his
early pieces, combined them with four new essays, and added a
spare, forceful preface.
"Very early on you are convinced that the author is in love with
the land he is writing about, and that he is a real writer. The
mysteries of this Inland Ground are teasingly hinted at and
sometimes brilliantly illuminated (as in poetically rendered essays
on hog-butchering, on wheat-growing, on the Writers' Workshop in
Iowa). Mr. Rhodes has the skill and the love of language as well as
of the land to bring it to our attention and our
understanding.--""New York Times Book Review."
"Richard Rhodes' Middle West is a sweep of the American earth
from the St. Louis arch to the eastern border of Colorado. On the
subjects of wheat, coyote hunting, hog butchering, Truman, and
Eisenhower, Rhodes is poetic.--""Indiana Magazine of History."
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