Inspired by WPA American Guide Series

looks like fun for GR Group: Fans of Maps maybe

Low star rating is my personal opinion. I found these essays mostly instantly forgettable - the states I am familiar with, I barely recognized. Also, too many selections were personal memoirs - exploring a particular experience at a particular time in the past, and saying nothing about the character of the state itself. Of the others, the majority were less personal memoirs... iow, the authors of those tried to speak to some ongoing characteristic of the state. And some of the tidbits were just plain wrong, for example claiming Utah's Spiral Jetty is visible from space." Sure, from LEO with a powerful telescope... "visible from space" is meaningless, even applied to something much more imposing, for example the Great Wall (look it up).

I opine that the most interesting thing was in the back, the 30 lists, of, for example, Roller Coasters per Capita, Violent Crime Rate, and Incarceration Rate... lists 18, 19, and 20 respectively... and I wonder why the second two don't align more closely than they do...." ( )

I loved this book. There are some fantastic essays in this collection---and a few bad ones---and the roll call of writers who participated in this anthology is impressive: S.E. Hinton, Sara Vowell, Tony Horowitz, George Packer, Kevin Brockmeier, Lydia Millet, William T. Vollman, Ha Jin, Rick Moody, Anthony Doerr, Dave Eggers, Jon Franzen, Jhumpa Lahiri and more than 35 others. Each author takes a different state and contributes a piece of writing about that state. Some of the writers were born in the state, some just visit or have spent time there. A great way to take a cross country trip without paying thousands of dollars. ( )

This collection of essays is a brilliant summer read. Short essays are digestible in between jaunts into the lake or the ocean, and a handful of them are laugh-out-loud funny. A few are lame (editors: you found a native North Dakotan and you couldn't find a native Texan??), and some are outstanding (Anthony Bourdain's New Jersey kicks all the other states' butts). I feel like I took a great road trip without having to drive through that boring-and-terrifying-all-at-once stretch of Pennsylvania with no gas stations and foresty hills hiding deer that want to jump in front of your car. ( )

As with all collections with essays by various authors, the results are somewhat uneven. However, I can’t imagine anyone who lives in or has traveled extensively in the United States not being interested in how the states they have lived in or visited are portrayed. I was thrilled that Anthony Bourdain took on my home state of New Jersey (and did a good job with it), and I thought it fitting that Oregon’s entry was one of the few in the form of a “comic” strip (which prominently featured rain and umbrellas). Looking back now, the essay I remember the most fondly was Dave Eggers’s take on Illinois. Although I read this book straight through, I think the better approach would be to read one or two states a day—or just dip your toes in every so often. In addition to the essays, there are little factoids about each state that were interesting in their own right. ( )