I’ve also recommended to President Biden’s administration that it instruct his new ambassadors to link up citizens in the country where they’re serving with the Our Towns network to make it an international web of civic activists, so that we learn not just from ourselves at home but also from citizens around the world. and seeing areas of the country that CNN and Fox News ignore. I’ve been giving copies of Our Towns to foreign ambassadors and consuls general, encouraging the diplomats to use the book and the newsletter as guides for getting out of D.C. The abiding faith is that America can be redeemed and renewed through democratic means. The tools include microbreweries and minor-league baseball stadiums as well as community colleges and community newspapers. They are not about winning partisan battles but about reclaiming the American democratic spirit. In many instances, these efforts transcend left/right, progressive/conservative and Black/White categories. The examples that the Fallows continue to uncover and document are not trivial or inconsequential. Instead, they decided to expand their domestic work on multiple media fronts – cooperating on an HBO documentary based on the book and then, even more significantly, establishing the Our Towns Civic Foundation, which uses the tools of 21st-century communication – Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and an electronic newsletter – to build a virtual network of civic-minded Americans engaged in renewing their communities.Īmong the optimistic stories in the most recent newsletter is one on an effort in Erie, Pennsylvania, to support refugee-owned business startups and another on the Lake Area Technical College in Watertown, South Dakota, one of the best community colleges in the country. They largely completed the book before the election of Donald Trump and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.Īfter the book’s publication, the Fallows did not move on to reporting from another country or choose another topic for a book. While not ignoring race and class divisions, they did not emphasize them. It is fair to say that the Fallows were looking for good news about America – examples of locales where people came together to solve civic problems and improve their communities – and they found plenty of uplifting stories to report. They chronicled what they found in articles in the Atlantic and compiled them in a best-selling book, Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America. Making use of Jim’s skills as a pilot, the couple crisscrossed the country in a small plane for five years, looking for stories of change and renewal, mostly in midsize towns.

In 2012, two journalists – Jim Fallows, a correspondent for the Atlantic, and his wife Deb Fallows – returned to the United States after years reporting from China and decided to reacquaint themselves with their own country. An earlier version of this review was published by the Clinton Institute, University College, Dublin. Here he takes a retrospective look at James Fallows and Deborah Fallows, Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America (New York: Pantheon, 2018).

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