Nowheresville

TWO NEW NONFICTION BOOKS BY STAR JOURNALISTS EXPLORE A CHANGING WAY OF LIFE IN RURAL AMERICA

- Craig Fehrman

WHEN YOU LIVE far from the city, it can feel like there are only two options: move or be forgotten. Yet a pair of new books—one set in the red-rock canyons of Utah, the other in the pastures of Pennsylvania—suggest a third possibility: adapt.

In The Last Cowboys ($27, W.W. Norton), John Branch tells the story of the Wrights, who settled in southwestern Utah 156 years ago. Today patriarch Bill Wright tends to a couple hundred cattle. He and his wife, Evelyn, have 13 children and a herd of grandchildren; each year the family reunites to brand the new calves. Branch, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter at The New York Times, describes the action expertly—the noise, the dust, the smell of scorched flesh. “It smells like money,” one participant says.