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Methland The Death and Life of an American Small Town

By Real Cost of Prisons Project (The Sentencing Project)

Wasted Land Methland The Death and Life of an American Small Town By Nick Reding 255 pp. Bloomsbury. $25 Reviewed By WALTER KIRN Published: NY Times Book Review July 1, 2009 Think globally, suffer locally. This could be the moral of ?Methland,? Nick Reding?s unnerving investigative account of two gruesome years in the life of Oelwein, Iowa, a railroad and meatpacking town of several thousand whipped by a methamphetamine-laced panic whose origins lie outside the place itself, in forces almost too great to comprehend and too pitiless to bear. The ravages of meth, or ?crank,? on Oelwein and countless forsaken locales much like it are shown to be merely superficial symptoms of a vaster social dementia caused by, among other things, the iron dominion of corporate agriculture and the slow melting of villages and families into the worldwide financial stew...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog on July 04, 2009 (boomark / email).