Methland The Death And Life Of An American Small Post 2

Through four years of reporting, Reding brings us into the heart of rural America through a cast of intimately drawn characters. "Methland "is a portrait not just of a town, but of small-town America on the brink. Centered on one community battling for a brighter future, it reveals the connections between the real-life people touched by the drug epidemic and the global forces behind it. "Methland" provides a vital perspective on a contemporary tragedy, ultimately offering the very thing that meth once took from Oelwein: hope. "This is a strong book, and it tells a complicated story in comprehensible, human dimensions. "Think globally, suffer locally. This could be the moral of "Methland," Nick Reding's unnerving investigative account of . . . Oelwein, Iowa, a railroad and meatpacking town of several thousand whipped by a methamphetamine-laced panic whose origins lie outside the place itself.  Details, with blunt statistics and apt anecdotes, the vanishing of educated young males from rural Iowa, as well as the butchering of middle-class jobs at the local packing plant. 'Vicious cycle' is not an adequate term. As Reding painstakingly presents it, the production, distribution and consumption of methamphetamine is a self-catalyzing catastrophe of Chernobylish dimensions. The rich, with their far-off, insulated lives, get richer and more detached, while the poor get high and, finally, waste.