Bridging the Distance: Common Issues of the Rural West ed. by David B. Danbom

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bridging the Distance: Common Issues of the Rural West ed. by David B. Danbom J. L. Anderson David B. Danbom, ed., Bridging the Distance: Common Issues of the Rural West. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2015. 312 pp. $30.00. Bridging the Distance brings together scholars from multiple disciplines to reckon with the issue of the vast space of the rural West. The authors in the collection represent fields as diverse as journalism, law, geography, public health, and history, to name just a few. They engage the history of energy industry, broadband access, small town economies, the Sagebrush Rebellion and more. The collection was born at a conference sponsored by the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. To his credit, editor David Danbom has forged those widely divergent approaches and disciplines into a collection that delivers on its promise to show how the expansiveness of the rural West has been a challenge not only for westerners but also for scholars who attempt to make sense of it. Each of the essays engage the topic of bridging physical or cultural distance. Of course, it is impossible to convey a full sense of the ten essays in the book, so a few highlights will suffice. Jon Lauck demonstrates how the West has figured in the historical imagination as well as the importance of regionalism. Historian David Rich Lewis traces the divide between Utah [End Page 89] officials and the Goshute as well as among Goshutes over the suitability and desire for economic development a temporary storage facility for nuclear waste in Skull Valley. State officials went to great lengths to undermine the native decision to bring hazardous waste into Skull Valley even as the state welcomed other toxic waste, some of it more toxic than that proposed by the Goshutes. In an essay on the reporting of a small-town scandal in Colorado, journalism professor Judy Miller describes the importance of the distance between insider and outsider in news reporting. In other essays, readers learn how water and wolves divide communities as well as how rural Hispanics have disproportionately poor health outcomes compared to their urban counterparts and the general population. The collection succeeds in large part because the multidiscipline case-study approach effectively conveys the complexity of the region. Furthermore, every one of the essays directly relates to the issue of distance. Readers learn how rural westerners overcame some problems associated with distance and how they failed to resolve many other problems. Scholars interested in addressing the common issues of the Midwest should pay close attention to Bridging the Distance and draw inspiration from its success. J. L. Anderson Mount Royal University Calgary, Alberta Copyright © 2018 Paul Mokrzycki Renfro