Country of Exiles: The Destruction of Place in American Life

In Country of Exiles, William Leach, whose Land of Desire was a finalist for the National Book Award, explores the troubling effects of our national love affair with mobility. He shows us how the impulse to pull up stakes and find a new frontier has always battled with the need to put down roots, and how a new cosmopolitanism has seized our national identity.

Leach takes us across a featureless America, where strip malls homogenize a once varied and majestic landscape, and where casinos disp...