Country of Exiles
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In Country of Exiles, William Leach, whose Land of Desire was a finalist for the National Book Award, explores the troubling effects of our national love affair with mobility. He shows us how the impulse to pull up stakes and find a new frontier has always battled with the need to put down roots, and how a new cosmopolitanism has seized our national identity.
Leach takes us across a featureless America, where strip malls homogenize a once varied and majestic landscape, and where casinos displace the Native American spiritual connection to the land. He shows us a culture where everyone, from CEOs to office temps, abandons the notion of company loyalty, and where rootless academics posit a world without borders. With compelling vision and insight, Leach reveals the profound but often hidden impact of America's disintegrating sense of place on our national and individual psyche.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pointing to the lack of rootedness and community in what he calls the "global age," Leach (Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture) explores and laments the centrifugal forces forever flinging Americans out of their localities into a borderless world. Alternating between observations on contemporary capitalism and cultural criticism, Leach offers a blend of populist indignation (e.g., at corporations with no sense of loyalty to a particular place and its workers), nativist insularity and atavistic yearning for stability. To illustrate the extent to which American culture has commodified the very idea of place, he offers an intelligent analysis of that endlessly captivating distillation of rootlessness, Las Vegas, a city which "flouts the past" and "serves only people on the move." Leach captures many aspects of a somewhat slippery topic, at times writing eloquently of how individuals are routinely uprooted and denatured by the pace of modern life in a world marked by incessant air travel, unimpeded worldwide shipping, an influx of and dependence on tourism--a world in which both people and goods richochet around the globe. Implicit, however, but never fully articulated by Leach, is the larger question of whether our endless pursuit of wealth is the chief culprit. That question will linger in the minds of readers after they finish this ambitious and absorbing reflection.
