Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America, by James Fallows and Deborah Fallows. New York: Pantheon Books. May 2018. ISBN: 9781101871843. 432 pages.

When I first started reading James and Deborah Fallows’ Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America, I was expecting a mash-up of something like William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways and Frances Moore Lappe’s Rediscovering America’s Values—that is, a travelogue of stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary public work in ordinary places across the United States. I could feel my resistance to the book’s “look on the positive side” approach since, these days, I often have my guard up against what I perceive as the political and cultural erosion of hard-won public policies affecting people and places I care about. The title’s cute nod to Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play about Grover’s Corners only fanned my skepticism. As it turns out, I was partially right, but I was mostly wrong.