Country of Exiles: The Destruction of Place in American Life [Paperback]

In Country of Exiles, William Leach, whose Land of Desire was a finalist for the National Book Award, explores the troubling effects of our national love affair with mobility.  He shows us how the impulse to pull up stakes and find a new frontier has always battled with the need to put down roots, and how a new cosmopolitanism has seized our national identity.

Leach takes us across a featureless America, where strip malls homogenize a once varied and majestic landscape, and where casinos displace the Native American spiritual connection to the land. He shows us a culture where everyone, from CEOs to office temps, abandons the notion of company loyalty, and where rootless academics posit a world without borders.  With compelling vision and insight, Leach reveals the profound but often hidden impact of America's disintegrating sense of place on our national and individual psyche."Brilliant. . . . Leach [is] one of the most creative and critical historians of
American culture and social history."   --The San Diego Union-Tribune

"Thoughtful, well-written, well-argued." --Choice

"Quite persuasive." --Times Literary Supplement

"A forcefully argued, gracefully written requiem for our country's vanishing attachment to specific places." --Salon

"[Leach's] analysis is eye-opening. . . . Perhaps the most searching and thoughtful examination of the specific causes that may underlie the current prevalence of incivility." --The Christian Science MonitorWilliam Leach lives in Carmel, New York.        In 1920 Thorstein Veblen, America'sl3×