Will Hoyt: The Seven Ranges

Ranking just behind rainfall, community is essential for a subsistence farm: If you're going to be a freak, you want to do it in good company.

We look forward this Friday at our local monthly street fair (music, beer, brats (the kind you eat), brats (the other kind), the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the influential and the overlooked) to enjoying some of the best company when author Will Hoyt signs books and shares conversation at BookMarx, the wonderful used bookstore/hangout that helps anchor our dilapidated but thriving downtown.

If you haven't read The Seven Ranges: Ground Zero for the Staging of America, you've got something to look forward to. As a cultural/historical ignoramus, I found the book both challenging (had to refer often to the end notes) and hugely instructive. Framed in the account of a journey he took on an Ohio river tug (picture me green with envy), this is the story of our United States that you've never heard before, a tight mesh of political and economic ambition, subsistence farming, Evangelical revivalism, Thoreau, and rock'n'roll.

See you Friday night on 4th Street.