Great read. Really enjoyed this read. Well written. Thanks to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for the ARC of this book in return for my honest review. Receiving the book in this manner had no bearing on my review.

A very good book. Engaging, illuminating, and passionately written. As the Trump years continue (hopefully soon to end), Kendzior's book remains valuable and important. Refreshingly focused on parts of the United States that are so often dismissed, this is a very good book. Definitely recommended, I would also recommend the author's newest book, too. (Also her podcast.)

These essays were originally written and published between 2012 and 2014 for Al Jazeera where she worked as a journalist. Sarah Kendzior then collected the essays in 2015 after quitting when there was a rebranding being undertaken, and sold the book collection online.

Kendzior got quite a lot of attention after the 2016 election with her book becoming a bestseller by people trying to understand the election results. The book was picked up and reissued by Flatiron Press, with a new introduction and epilogue added in.

While not all of the essays are equally powerful, the collection does add up to something significant. Nearly all are talking about the issues that one can point to as why the middle class is not getting ahead anymore. Why there is the huge gap between the rich and poor, how now adayws there is this "pay to play" necessity with everything from college, internships, jobs and publishing research.

Despite the political asepect none of these essays are irrelevant today, and until things actually change significantly will continue to remain so. Although Kendzior is speaking for the "Flyover" area of the country, she also speaks for those who live on the edges of the country, the coasts and everywhere inbetween.

Perhaps this is not an uplifting book, in fact downright depressing at times, but I find there is hope. That someone is saying what needs to be said, and people (some at least) are listening.

These essays are collected from the last few years and I'd already read some of them, or some versions of them, online. But it was still a valuable use of my time to read all of her sharp insights about American culture (and how fucked up it is). If you're not familiar with Sarah Kendzior, she's such a smart and insightful writer, I can't recommend her insights enough.

The View From Flyover Country in many ways left me wanting more. I am familiar with Ms Kendzior mostly through social media and television commentary, and I was hoping for more updated insights and observations. The book consists of essays written prior to 2015, and while I can draw conclusions regarding the history revealed and the political climate today, I wanted more than just an updated preface and epilogue. I certainly agree that the essays have value, and as social commentary deserve a wider platform. I wanted more critical analysis, and to be honest a little hope for the future.

This is so spot on. I pity the younger generation and it's children, if this country doesn't right itself soon. Sad day in our history. This book would pair well with Squeezed by Alissa Quart. Must read for anyone trying to figure out what is wrong with our nation.

The title and description of this book are pretty misleading - I'm not sure how most of these essays relate to "living in flyover country," as they seem pretty universally american (under employment, low and stagnant wages, systemic bias, gentrification, diminishing trust in government and institutions, etc.). I guess I also expected a bit more "journalism" here - interviews, cited sources, etc. - but these essays read more like angry blog posts.

Also, I know these were all originally published elsewhere and collected for this book, but there is A LOT of repetition here. The same topics, facts and sentiments appear over and over. Perhaps some of these should've been either consolidated or removed, since this is a collection/book and not one-offs?

Finally, while all of these things are important to name and say and talk about, I don't feel like any new ground was covered here. If you've been "woke" for a bit, you've already seen and heard all of these complaints and arguments; if you're not, then you're probably not picking up this book anyway.

Title: The View from Flyover Country

Author: Sarah Kendzior



What I liked: It was honest. It looked at the problems people were having and their causes without making excuses or throwing blame around. It read quickly. The writing was clear and clever, which kept me interested throughout.



What I didn't like: Because it was an essay collection, a lot of the information and examples got repetitive, especially towards the end.



Kendzior is not easy on the people who live in flyover country, but she is forgiving. She is realistic. She is not hopeful about the future as it stands, but seems hopeful about what it could be.



4/5 stars

Originally published in 2015 and republished in 2018 with a new forward and an epilogye by the author, this collection of essays focuses on topics faced by the majority of Americans in the early 2010s - poverty and economic disparity, the rising cost of education, the diminishing value of that education, racism, who decides whose humanity matters, and more. I found them a bit repetitive because they were almost all essays that had been previously published in different places, so the author was following similar themes in multiple settings.

She lives in St. Louis and speaks to the topics from a personal place too, not just a journalist, but someone whose children attend school here, who experiences the same kind of legislation, etc. That added a layer that made the essays much more real.

A lot of attention has been given to [book:Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis|27161156] to "understand Trump voters." I think this book is more steeped in facts and numbers, doesn't stereotype all Trump voters or everyone in flyover country to the most extreme racist white guys who lost their manufacturing jobs (Kendzior exhibits far more nuance than that), and is probably a better picture of what has been going on for normal people trying to make it in America, and overall really not making it.

THE VIEW FROM FLYOVER COUNTRY by Sarah Kendzior is a series of essays, most of which were originally published between 2012 and 2014 and then collated in an ebook. As she says, "I had tracked the death of the American Dream in real time and because I focused on those who suffered, many people turned to my book for an explanation." Now updated and available in print, Kendzior's essays passionately describe instances of declining equality and accompanying indifference: "pundits have been proclaiming there are 'two Americas,' red and blue. ... America is purple – purple like a bruise." Examples of specific topics include the Midwest's continued regional decline, the changing role of media, increasing cost of higher education, prevalence of unpaid internships, social injustices like the trial after Trayvon Martin's death, and the risks to freedom of speech and press from authoritarian leaders. Kendzior is currently an op-ed columnist for the Globe and Mail (Toronto), has written for numerous publications, and is well-known for her research on foreign demagogues and for her coverage of the 2016 election. Writing of its aftermath, she says, "What has become known as 'the resistance' is simply people helping each other, an idea that is subversive under an administration that peddles cruelty as conventional." With Kendzior's biting insights on many social and economic issues, there is much to contemplate in THE VIEW FROM FLYOVER COUNTRY.

Link in live post: https://twitter.com/sarahkendzior

I really enjoyed this book. As the teacher in charge of stocking the senior school library, I like to ensure that the books are diverse and the students are exposed to both excellent fiction and excellent modern non-fiction. I think that this is both a fascinating and well-written book that has much to recommend it and will keep the students interests. It is good to stretch their reading interests by providing them with books about subjects they might never have considered before and this definitely does the job well. It is also good to find books that I know the teaching staff might enjoy as well as the students and I definitely think that this applies in both cases. Absolutely recommend wholeheartedly; a fantastic read.

This collection of provocative essays stings like a slap to the face. Several articles are almost prophetic in tone. I'm content to have read them, but I'm unsure whether it'll make a difference in an emotionally charged, reactionary age. (I hope it does.)

Netgalley ebook. this is a reprint, with some info added. my ereader would not allow previously published information's font to be enlarged to a reasonable size, so I was unable to comfortably read this, although the subject matter sounds fascinating.

If you have never read Sarah Kendzior's works, then I would recommend you start with this collection of essays on the state of America as regards labor, higher education, race and religion, creativity and "prestige economy."
I received a digital copy of the book from NetGalley and I was curious to know why the title 'Flyover Country,' and once I started reading the first essay I could not help but relate to most of what she wrote.
The book is divided into six parts each with essays on a theme, and this makes for easier reading. I did however find her take on higher education and the treatment of adjunct professors a stark representation of what I see happening to some degree in Kenya, because there is the need for research and publication and most of the credit goes to tenured professors and not their assistants.
This is a book that I'd love to keep in my library, a constant reality check of what happens when injustice carries the day.

This book is important and needed. The author, a journalist, has pulled together essays she has published on the economy, politics, racism, and classism that show that there are systemic injustices in our country that prevent class mobility for most Americans. The book is divided into sections that address the problems with the economy, race and religion, higher education, and the media. The author is from Missouri and often uses it as an example. She shows how the American dream is far out of reach, even for the middle-class, using statistics and explanations of policies and systems that make her claims hard to deny. Since the book is a collection of previously-published essays, some stories are repeated. It was hard for me to keep going with this book because I knew much of this already, and the book added to my anger and inflated a sense of overwhelm at all that needs to be done to get things moving in the right direction again. The author often encourages us to help one another, work together, and stand up to make a change, but some more hopeful stories would have helped balance things more.

Interesting essays. Like many collections, they are hit or miss for me. But, as they appear to have been previously published, there is no coherent organization and the ideas are often repetitive. I think I would have enjoyed reading in the original publications more.

I enjoyed both revisiting these incredibly potent essay by Sarah Kendzior. This is a crucial and compassionate collection.

This book is a series of essays that have previously been published in other places. I found each essay to be well written and obviously she has spent a lot of time thinking about the subject matter, but I'm not sure I always agree with her ultimate conclusions.

She often rails against meritocracy, academia and internship programs - with good reason - while she doesn't offer alternatives. I struggle to understand why universities continue to produce Ph.Ds at high rates, while so many have trouble earning a living wage. And knowing this is the result, why are people continuing to get Ph.Ds. In a time when these fields are plagued with unpaid internships and under-paid jobs, why wouldn't the author promote fields where there are well-paying jobs - like the trades. Why rail against the realities of flooded job markets with too many applicants for too few positions.

Instead the reader is left with the impression that the ONLY options for well paying jobs are out of reach for the average person. Yet STEM fields are struggling to find people and those careers continue to have new job openings and not enough people to fill them.

Part of my issue with this comes from the difference between private education in the US and the public system in my own country. There are few barriers to attendance in my country and even as the daughter of a small, poor farmer in the middle of several years of drought, I was able to earn scholarships and get a degree that has kept me gainfully employed for many years and I didn't go past a bachelor's degree. Where I currently find myself overworked due to a lack of candidates for jobs we have posted.

I also found it interesting that in one essay, she commends a woman tweeting her way through the end-stages of cancer, flaying mainstream media sources who expressed discomfort with the situation. Only to be followed by another essay discussing privacy and Edward Snowden. This essay seemed to have an unclear conclusion. Did she support Snowden's actions or not? Does she value privacy? If people can't make educated decisions on what privacy they are giving up, how can she berate people who are uncomfortable with the amount of privacy another person is willing to give up?

The essay on truth in the George Bush era comes with a hearty dose of irony as I look fondly back at those days of heady ignorance about how bad creating one's own reality can be for a country, it's people and the world. I know now the WMD were only the beginning of outrageous lies told to a believing society hoping for something better for themselves and their families.

An old adage says to write what you know. As a journalist living in a decayed Midwestern city waiting - and waiting and waiting - for the Great Recession to end, that was what I knew.

Political writer, analyst and academic researcher of authoritarian states Sarah Kendzior rose to prominence a few years ago after being one of the first journalists to predict that Trump would win the election. Since then, she's successfully (but what is success here) predicted many other twists and turns the Trump administration would take. Kendzior credits this fortunetelling ability to her location in St. Louis, Missouri, within the "flyover country" of the title, that much of the media and the so-called coastal elites seem to forget about, or at least discount in terms of significance.

Between 2012 and 2014, Kendzior wrote op-ed pieces for Al Jazeera, focusing heavily on topics like the inequality in higher education, particularly with respect to family income and projected income after graduation, the new economy born of the 2008 recession and its reduced opportunities for fairly paid employment, the "pay-for-play" nature of academia and professorship, the unfairness faced by adjunct professors, issues of internet privacy, gentrification, and the media's role in some of these topics.

The essays were collectively published in 2015 as an ebook, but are now being rereleased in paperback form with a new epilogue including some words about the Trump presidency.

These are heavy issues, obviously, and well-trodden ones - even as Kendzior points out that they're still not getting enough attention, or what attention they receive dies down quickly, or is easily surpassed by panda cams instead of a continued focus on and agitation for change regarding cut-off water supplies to people in Detroit who couldn't pay their water bills.

Kendzior occupies the unique position of writing from and observing this often misunderstood segment of the country from within. Unlike many liberal journalists, she hasn't relocated farther afield to one of the major media cities, instead staying in the Midwest and chronicling the changes the region endures. I'd come across her essays before here and there but hadn't read them all, and I was expecting something quite different - as the title indicates, I thought there would be more of that view from the ground. There is, to some extent, but it's a much bigger picture that Kendzior paints.

I felt so down after reading these. Kendzior was prepared for that:

At a time when Americans were continually being informed that our crises were over - the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were ending, we lived in a post-racial society, the good jobs would be back any day now - I saw no improvements on the ground. America had returned to "normal," politicians and pundits proclaimed, but "normal" felt like a crisis. And when you live in a crisis, you write with urgency, because you need problems to be solved.

So in the era of the audacity of hope, I made a case for the audacity of despair.

This is where you may be thinking to yourself, "Wow, this is going to be a really depressing book!" And it might be, but that never was and is not my intent. One cannot solve a problem until one acknowledges a problem exists.

There wasn't much that was newly upsetting, it was just the oppressive effect reading it all at once. It knocks the breath out of you. These are best taken in small doses.

As defeated and hopeless as some of this information made me feel, I don't think that should at all discourage anyone from reading it; on the contrary, it's a must-read. It doesn't do any good to bury your head in the sand and pretend any of this isn't true. The reality is harsh and Kendzior has an excellent clear, explanatory style that makes her analysis so helpful in understanding the state of so much of what's happening in the US today.

There is no America that is "real" or "fake." This insistence that we have an inherent divide has in some respects become a self-fulfilling prophecy. At this contentious point in our history, these divergent Americas are unified most, unfortunately, by a collective sense of pain. America is purple - purple like a bruise.

One of the topics that Kendzior writes particularly powerfully about is the elitism of academia, and the sad reality that investing in a higher education nowadays doesn't carry the same guarantee of a more secure future, as it once did. The facts and figures she uses to back this up are downright terrifying. She frequently returns to the subject of the unfair treatment of adjunct professors, the near-poverty (or sometimes just poverty, no near about it) conditions they live in in order to teach.

To work outside of academia, even temporarily, signals you are not "serious" or "dedicated" to scholarship. 

She explains that teaching is viewed as a "calling" like with religion - so one should be fine with accepting little or no pay for this work.

Academic paywalls are often presented as a moral or financial issue. How can one justify profiting off unpaid labor while denying the public access to research frequently funded through taxpayer dollars? But paywalls also have broader political consequences. Whether or not an article is accessible affects more than just the author or reader. It affects anyone who could potentially benefit from scholarly insight, information, or expertise - that is, everyone.

It does not have to be this way. Imagine a college application system in which applicants could only take standardized tests once. Imagine a system in which young people working jobs to support their families were valued as much as those who travel and "volunteer" on their parents' dime. Imagine a system in which we value what a person does with what he has, instead of mistaking a lack of resources for a lack of ability.

It's so hard to read her explanations, particularly on this subject where I think her experience speaks volumes about the situation and she has such clear, reasonable ideas for addressing it.

Elsewhere, despite the importance of the information she brings to light and situations she highlights, it seemed like she was only relating how shocking or unfortunate these things were without offering any helpful ideas towards fixing them. That's not a burden that falls entirely on her shoulders, lest I make it sound that way - but she's so capable elsewhere of offering sensible ideas for fixing what's broken, like when discussing what's wrong with our higher education system, that the lack of suggestion or path on other topics feels that much more pronounced. She's so smart and eloquent at framing these problems that I want to hear more of her suggestions on how to repair these horribly broken things, not only see her training a floodlight on them.

"Who could have predicted a Trump win?" pundits pondered, and the answer was often blacks, Latinos, Muslims, and residents of the ignored heartland regions where he gained popularity - the people whom Trump treated as target practice, and people in regions he targeted for votes. These folks are the "no one" in the oft-said and inaccurate phrase of "no one saw it coming," a phrase that indicts the fool that utters it. Many Americans saw it coming, but their warnings were often dismissed as implausible or, worse, hysterical, when they were simply logical predictions based on lived experience. The people pushed to the margins in the heartland knew it would not be okay, because it had never been okay. For many, the hypotheticals had already happened.

Disturbing but necessary dispatches, not only from America's heartland, but from everywhere within a system that's broken and not on any path towards repair. Alarming and scary but very smartly detailed. Her voice is one to carefully follow in the current political and social climate - just the weekend I was reading this, she gave one of the most incredible 60 second takedowns of Trump and his connection/susceptibility to blackmail on AM Joy. Kendzior is one to follow closely, and this book is one to ruminate on.

Interesting, But Repetitive and Loosely Themed

This is a collection of essays written between 2012 and 2014. Apart from an epilogue written in 2017 it does not address the Trump presidency. Apart from some very interesting pieces about St. Louis it doesn't have anything specific to say about "flyover country", except to the extent that any part of the country that isn't wealthy seems to be flyover country.

That said, there are thoughtful and eminently quotable pieces about the sorts of concerns that have made Americans increasingly uneasy and dissatisfied, and to that extent I guess it prefigures the "forgotten middle class" explanation for Trump. How and why people fell for Trump's song and dance, though, is not addressed.

What is addressed, at length and in convincing fashion, is how decent job opportunities are increasingly foreclosed to all except the wealthy and privileged. From how cities like New York and San Francisco have become just gated communities for elites, and how higher education has become a con and a closed door to the merited poor, Kendzior is articulate and persuasive. Her discussions of the "post-employment economy", where everyone is underpaid and insecure, is especially compelling and fairly rigorous. Sections on the "closing of American academia" are thought provoking, although the emphasis is on the exploitation of academics rather than of students, which is an interesting angle. There are a few pieces on foreign policy, but we seem to be on less firm ground with those.

The upshot, for me, was that I think the sales pitch about being a Trump critic and predicting the rise of Trump is a bit overblown for this collection, but the larger vitality and interest of the pieces, especially about jobs and opportunity, should be valued and appreciated on their own merits. Kendzior moves beyond shallow punditry and her opinions are worth serious thought. And she writes wonderfully.

(Please note that I received a free advance ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)