Homeland Elegies

I can't think of a better way to get some perspective on what's happened in America over the past forty years, with an emphasis on the past five, than to read [a:Ayad Akhtar|4783638|Ayad Akhtar|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1579404134p2/4783638.jpg]'s [b:Homeland Elegies|50358133|Homeland Elegies|Ayad Akhtar|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1584627596l/50358133.SY75.jpg|73536602]. After I read books—never before—I look at the blurbs on the dust jacket. The best one on this is from Salman Rushdie: "Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable."
 Don't let that Akhtar's roots are in Pakistan deter you from reading it because you think it will be a niche book by someone with an ax to grind. I'm not even sure how many generation of white people born in the U.S. I'm descended from, but Akhtar, who was born in the U.S., is more American than I am, though I'm not really sure what that means.
Good books teach you things and great books do that and also make you think. That's what this one does. A bonus: Whether you're interested in how writers work or not, Akhtar gives you a good idea of what his process is like. He's a playwright and his ability to render dialogue is as good as you'll ever find.
 The book is a mix of a personal family story and essay. The two mesh perfectly.

Locality itself was in decline, as dollars were drained from the American Heartlands and allocated to points of prosperity along the urban coasts. In the South, it was in farming that you saw the worst of it. People—black, white, or brown—couldn't live off their land anymore. Corporate consolidation led to larger and larger tracts and the increasingly automated systems required to water and harvest them. Prices for produce dropped, yes—but so did the tax base. There'd never been more jobs that paid so little, most of which went to migrants who didn't object to making a pittance. Towns were poorer, which meant schools were poorer, too. Public education started to crumble. So did the roads and bridges. There were fewer landowners giving less money to an ever-dwindling number of churches and charities. Everywhere you went, people poured into big-box stores to spend less on things they had less money to buy. The twenty-year downward slope of opportunity and morale in places like Opelika and Wichita and Grand Rapids and Scranton—defined a descent from which, increasingly, there appeared to be no recourse. Suicide was on the rise, and so were drugs, depression, anger.
 And all this was before the financial crisis.