Methland

The New York Times

2009

Methland, The Death and Life of an American Small Town.

By Nick Reding.

255 pp. Bloomsbury

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 Olwein, 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.

Walter Kirn