Much of our national dialogue in recent years has focused on the America left behind: the working-class towns, the backwoods communities, the places abandoned by capitalism that seemingly had no answers to their ongoing decline.
In this ambitious, exhaustively reported book, James and Deborah Fallows visited nearly 30 such places that have found their answers. James, a national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, and Deborah, an author and academic (they are married to each other), spent more than four years crisscrossing America in their small plane.
They mostly focused on communities off the beaten path; in other words, they flew into flyover country. And what they found should give hope to the America that's reeling from decades of social, political, financial and technological upheaval.
As the authors dropped from the sky into communities from Sioux Falls, S.D., to Duluth, to Ajo, N.M., to Burlington, Vt., to St. Mary's, Ga., they slowly pieced together a list of qualities that determine why some communities make it and others don't. Among them: innovative schools, true public-private partnerships and real, thriving downtowns.
But the real key to success, they found, is people. The authors had a standard question they'd ask soon after arriving in a new place:
"Who makes this town go?"
The answer could be a business tycoon, a civic activist, even a saloon keeper or a folk musician.
"What mattered was that the question had an answer," the authors write. "The more quickly this question was answered, the better shape a town was in."
