A Review of Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town

I gakked this from Halvard Johnson on Facebook. Not the meth, the review, dummy.

Let's hope it's theft he doesn't mind. It is the NY Times after all.

By WALTER KIRN

Published: July 1, 2009

Think globally, suffer locally. This could be the moral of “Methland,” Nick Reding’s unnerving investigative account of two gruesome years in the life of Oelwein, Iowa, a railroad and meatpacking town of several thousand whipped by a methamphetamine-laced panic whose origins lie outside the place itself, in forces almost too great to comprehend and too pitiless to bear. The ravages of meth, or “crank,” on Oelwein and countless forsaken locales much like it are shown to be merely superficial symptoms of a vaster social dementia caused by, among other things, the iron dominion of corporate agriculture and the slow melting of villages and families into the worldwide financial stew.

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This is happening as well in the Twin Tiers, the area where I grew up, particularly in Bradford County PA, whose county seat, Newsweek claimed a few years ago, is yet another Meth Valley.

They're EVERYWHERE, folks! Gitcher own.