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Our Towns
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  • Published: 5 February 2019
  • ISBN: 9780525432449
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $35.00

Our Towns

A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America

Formats & editions
EBook
8 May 2018
Audiobook
8 May 2018
Paperback
5 Feb 2019
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This unique, revelatory portrait of the civic and economic renewal taking place today across America, town by town and generally out of view of the national media, presents a surprisingly hopeful view of the country between its coasts.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "James and Deborah Fallows have always moved to where history is being made.... They have an excellent sense of where world-shaping events are taking place at any moment" —The New York Times • The basis for the HBO documentary streaming on HBO Max

For five years, James and Deborah Fallows have travelled across America in a single-engine prop airplane. Visiting dozens of towns, the America they saw is acutely conscious of its problems—from economic dislocation to the opioid scourge—but it is also crafting solutions, with a practical-minded determination at dramatic odds with the bitter paralysis of national politics. At times of dysfunction on a national level, reform possibilities have often arisen from the local level. The Fallowses describe America in the middle of one of these creative waves.

Their view of the country is as complex and contradictory as America itself, but it also reflects the energy, the generosity and compassion, the dreams, and the determination of many who are in the midst of making things better. Our Towns is the story of their journey—and an account of a country busy remaking itself.
  • Published: 5 February 2019
  • ISBN: 9780525432449
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $35.00
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About the authors

James Fallows

JAMES FALLOWS has been a national correspondent for The Atlantic for more than thirty-five years, reporting from China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Europe, and across the United States. He is the author of eleven previous books. His work has also appeared in many other magazines and as public-radio commentaries since the 1980s. He has won a National Book Award and a National Magazine Award. For two years he was President Jimmy Carter’s chief speechwriter.
portrait photo of James Fallows

Deborah Fallows

DEBORAH FALLOWS is a linguist and writer who holds a PhD in theoretical linguistics and is the author of two previous books. She has written for The Atlantic, National Geographic, Slate, The New York Times, and The Washington Monthly, and has worked at the Pew Research Center, Oxygen Media, and Georgetown University. She and her husband have two sons and five grandchildren.
portrait photo of Deborah Fallows

Praise for Our Towns

  • "An eye-opening, keenly optimistic reminder of the strength of America's vital center." --Publishers Weekly

  • "A tonic of a book about the can-do America unready to succumb to rot." --Roger Cohen, The New York Times

  • "In the tradition of John Steinbeck and Studs Terkel, the Fallows have crisscrossed the country in search of the extraordinary strength and character of ordinary people and places. What they've found--in towns we know and others off the beaten path--should give us all great hope for the future." --California governor Edmund G. Brown Jr.