The Small-Town Midwest: Resilience and Hope in the Twenty-First Century by Julianne Couch

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Small-Town Midwest: Resilience and Hope in the Twenty-First Century by Julianne Couch John E. Miller, Emeritus The Small-Town Midwest: Resilience and Hope in the Twenty-First Century. By Julianne Couch. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016. 230 pp. Illustrations, index, note on sources. $35.00 paper. Selecting eight small towns of population 4,000 or less, plus one rural county, in the five heartland states of Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Wyoming, Julianne Couch takes us on a tour of what she calls the Midwest, describing the challenges and perils, as well as the successes and promises, of a way of life that becomes continually less familiar to most Americans. She writes as a curious observer of, but also as an advocate for, these types of small towns, which provide an alternative kind of more intimate and communal lifestyle than what is generally available in more anonymous, hectic, crime-ridden, and traffic-choked metropolitan places. Centennial in Wyoming, Bridgeport and Knox County in Nebraska, Tarkio and New Madrid in Missouri, and Emmetsburg and Belleview in Iowa provide a relatively diverse cross-section of small towns in the region, offering a sort of social laboratory for an inquiring reporter as Couch travels the region, asking why people like (or don’t like) living in their small towns, what keeps them there, how they get along with each other, how they work to find jobs and housing and ways to keep their towns economically viable, how they try to hold on to their young people and attract newcomers, and how they spend their leisure time. Born and raised in Johnson County, Kansas, the author now lives in Belleview, Iowa, where she writes, edits, and teaches online classes. With that kind of background, and eschewing sophisticated social-science methodology, she utilizes her previous experience as well as her journalistic training, literary sensibilities, and keen powers of observation to identify residents who can tell her what is going on, what has happened in the past, and what the future might portend. Key problems these communities contend with include especially the need for more families, affordable housing, and jobs. Readers familiar with books like Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalis’s Hollowing Out the Middle: Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America and Richard C. Longworth’s Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalization will be familiar with many of the themes addressed here: population decline, business startups and failures, outmigration, town boosterism, the search for jobs, infrastructure issues, bored youths, and community projects. Couch travels from town to town, engaging the reader and building up a case for the continued importance of small towns in an increasingly metropolitan-dominated society. As such, this book is a worthy addition to a long shelf of books on rural and small-town America. [End Page 72] John E. Miller, Emeritus Department of History South Dakota State University Copyright © 2017 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln