As myself a product of the American midwest the spirit of Bryson's work resonates strongly with many of my own formative experiences. The annual pilgrimage to the State Fair, storm-systems that move in across the plains, concoctions of "chemistry" experiments to amuse friends and terrify siblings, all of these were no-less important thirty years later. Being of midwestern extraction means being formed in a certain way, and having a particular take on the world that, as we grow older, we find never leaves us. Bryson captures this indefinable quality admirably.
Growing up during the 1950s, Bryson recounts an American past, and, he would argue, long gone. In addition to being a memoir this work is a lament, at times even a dirge, for ways of living and organizing lives and livelihoods that seem to have disappeared. While the fifties were arguably the greatest of height of American prosperity - albeit for Bryson's admitted midwestern, white, well-off background - the end of the decade would see a rise in consumption and subsequent necessity of working harder. With the birth of franchising and the shrinking of the world through communication and transportation, Des Moines, like many other middle American cities, would come to resemble every other place between the coasts in many ways. This gives Bryson's nostalgia an air of sadness and forces us to wonder at questions addressing what we hope for out of this life? While Bryson's particular childhood could never have transpired anywhere else, the larger concern is that, with the potential death of place-rootedness, we will lose something of the formative aspects of our character. When everywhere is the same how are we to know what it means to belong anywhere?
