Remaking the Heartland is an uneasy blend of memoir and monograph. Telling a familiar story of the transformation of a world of family farms and small towns into agribusiness and edge cities, acclaimed sociologist Robert Wuthnow contends that residents of the American Middle West have accepted this revolution with surprisingly little resistance or conflict. They have creatively adapted to rapid economic and spatial change, sustaining their faith in family and community and the ideals of common sense, neighborliness and education. Whether they live on farms or next to shopping malls matters less than their ability to appreciate each other and the landscape in which they live.

Nostalgia pervades Remaking the Heartland. “Had I never left the Middle West,” writes Wuthnow, “it likely would never have occurred to me to write about it at all” (256). Born in 1946, Wuthnow grew up on a farm somewhere west of the Mississippi River, assuming he would spend his life there until his father's sudden death in 1965 changed everything. He earned a PhD at the University of California at Berkeley and is now a distinguished member of the faculty at Princeton. In many ways, Wuthnow joins a long list of older men who, having grown up in the Middle West and then left it, wistfully recall a special place that they believe shaped them into successful human beings. In the manner of Ronald Reagan, the most famous recent example, they defend the Middle West against “elite” detractors who disparage its supposed lack of sophistication. Emigré boosters, they have no intention of resettling in the region. Separated by time and geography from an idealized version of their youth, they find a silver lining in every cloud. Characteristically, Wuthnow follows an analysis of the devastation of small towns in the Middle West with the comment that “residents of small communities did what they could to keep their towns as livable and attractive as possible” (169). They made do, as my grandmother used to say.

The nostalgic glow should not obscure the fact that Wuthnow the sociologist has written a valuable book about a neglected subject. He is right to argue that the 1950s was a major transitional decade. It was then that developing improvements in transportation and communication made it possible for the members of his generation living in the area he defines as the Middle West – the region from the states of Arkansas and Oklahoma north to the Dakotas – to imagine possibilities beyond local farms. Wuthnow is just as persuasive in arguing that many people were ambivalent about change. Personal interviews with mainly white individuals living in small towns or edge cities suggest that those who complain about the perceived impact of a Walmart store on local businesses often enjoy the convenience and prices. Those who moan about having to drive everywhere celebrate the independence they find with cars. More generally, many people welcome technological change because it initially seems to improve the quality of their lives; the unanticipated impact on social relationships comes later. Middle Western Americans often have a similar ambivalence about government. They have benefited enormously from massive spending by the government they so regularly denounce for benefiting others at their expense. Highlighting voices we rarely hear in academic work, Wuthnow's book is a valuable corrective to jeremiads about the Middle West.

The problem with Remaking the Heartland is that Wuthnow ignores or minimizes anything that might complicate his idealized portrait of consensus and persistence. Locating the Heartland west of the Mississippi and as far south as Arkansas means that he does not have to deal with the postindustrial Rust Belt in states many Americans associate with the Middle West, including Illinois, Indiana and Michigan. Wuthnow devotes scant attention to issues of race, ethnicity, immigration and class; in large part the perceptions of the usually white, comfortable people he and others interviewed constitute the bulk of his evidence. His book is about how certain people see themselves and their communities, or rather how they wish to present themselves to the rest of the world. There is surprisingly little engagement with sources that might question those perceptions or reveal conflict.

Indeed, Wuthnow can emphasize a lack of resistance to change because he completely ignores politics and public discourse. It is one thing for individuals in interviews to celebrate the importance of education and diversity; it is quite another for them to choose to vote to pay taxes to support schools they see as microcosms of a diverse society. Readers of Remaking the Heartland who accept Wuthnow's argument about the transformation of the American Middle West during his lifetime would be well advised to attend meetings of a local school board or the Tea Party. Or they could simply follow the quadrennial Iowa presidential caucuses. Meeting in homes and community centers, Iowans enact the rituals of American democracy and celebrate continuity with previous generations. But many of the participants will assert that their town, their state and their country are going to Hell in the proverbial handcart. Not understanding the structural transformations Wuthnow details so expertly, more than a few will blame that decline on other Americans who are somehow different. Adaptation occurs, but rarely without anger.