The Death and Life of Small-Town America

Methland: The Death and Life of An American Small Town

◎A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
◎A Best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Seattle Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch

The Death and Life of an American Small Town focuses on Oelwein, a small town in Iowa, in the heart of the American Midwest, to examine the development of thousands of small towns in the United States over the past 30 years and the efforts made by local residents to change the status quo. Swept up by the tide of globalization, these small towns have been forgotten by land consolidation and the development of agricultural industrialization. The local economy is in a slump, and the population is migrating out, trapped in low incomes and unemployment during the agricultural transformation. At this time, drugs took advantage of the vulnerability, not only comforting the poor and helpless but also forming a drug economy locally, with some people beginning to make a living from it. The rampant spread of drugs, in turn, further ravaged the already weak small towns.
Oelwein, addicted to drugs, is merely a microcosm of thousands of small towns across the United States, reflecting the vicious cycle of social conditions in contemporary American small towns under the forces of globalization. Almost simultaneously, a similar drug-town phenomenon appeared in Europe. Making moral judgments about this and advocating individual law-abiding self-discipline is almost futile, because the essence of this phenomenon is economic, and even more so, political.
The author, born in a small town, returned to his hometown to live for several years to write this book. He observed the production and consumption of drugs, befriended a doctor who was an alcoholic but dedicated to eradicating drugs, a prosecutor who handled drug-related cases, and addicts who had struggled with addiction for years, among other small-town residents... From such people, he observed and presented the death and life of American small towns, serving as a warning to the world.
The situation of small towns cannot simply be described as a "vicious cycle." Reading focuses on the present, and the production, distribution, and consumption of methamphetamine are a Chernobyl-level self-destructive disaster. The rich made their money and left; the poor got high and are ruined.
—The New York Times Book Review
This book makes us realize that American small towns may not be the morally upright, hardworking places that people imagine those who live there to be, but rather a dangerous and terrible place that is ignored by big cities, overlooked by the media, and gradually declining.
—The Washington Post
"A book completed through old-fashioned, door-to-door interviews... it mainly describes not stories about drugs and crime, physical dysfunction and psychological despair, but a tragic era of decline... From its production and sale to consumption, Reding meticulously presents the methamphetamine crisis as a self-inflicted disaster that has reached the level of the Chernobyl nuclear accident."
—Walter Kirn, The New York Times Book Review

2023-01-03

上海译文出版社

272

9787532785827