Matt Weiland

looks like fun for GR Group: Fans of Maps maybe

Low star rating is my personal opinion. I found these essays mostly instantly forgettable - the states I am familiar with, I barely recognized. Also, too many selections were personal memoirs - exploring a particular experience at a particular time in the past, and saying nothing about the character of the state itself. Of the others, the majority were less personal memoirs... iow, the authors of those tried to speak to some ongoing characteristic of the state. And some of the tidbits were just plain wrong, for example claiming Utah's Spiral Jetty is visible from space." Sure, from LEO with a powerful telescope... "visible from space" is meaningless, even applied to something much more imposing, for example the Great Wall (look it up).

I opine that the most interesting thing was in the back, the 30 lists, of, for example, Roller Coasters per Capita, Violent Crime Rate, and Incarceration Rate... lists 18, 19, and 20 respectively... and I wonder why the second two don't align more closely than they do...."… (more)

I loved this book. There are some fantastic essays in this collection---and a few bad ones---and the roll call of writers who participated in this anthology is impressive: S.E. Hinton, Sara Vowell, Tony Horowitz, George Packer, Kevin Brockmeier, Lydia Millet, William T. Vollman, Ha Jin, Rick Moody, Anthony Doerr, Dave Eggers, Jon Franzen, Jhumpa Lahiri and more than 35 others. Each author takes a different state and contributes a piece of writing about that state. Some of the writers were born in the state, some just visit or have spent time there. A great way to take a cross country trip without paying thousands of dollars.… (more)