Short Synopsis
Journalist Matt Dellinger uses the controversy surrounding the building of Interstate 69 as a lens through which to examine middle America's current political, social, and economic landscape.

Full Synopsis
New Yorker contributor and decade-long staffer Matt Dellinger uses the controversy surrounding Interstate 69 as a lens through which to examine middle America's current political, social, and economic landscape, including hot-button issues like NAFTA and the country's troubled infrastructure. If completed, I-69 will stretch from Canada to Mexico through Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. In the works for more than twenty years, the highway has been both eagerly anticipated as an economic godsend and the center of a firestorm of protests by local environmentalists, farmers, ranchers, anarchists, and others who question both the wisdom of building more highways and the merits of globalization.

Part history, part travelogue, Interstate 69 chronicles the last great highway project in America, introducing the people who have worked tirelessly to build it or stop it from being built, and the many places it would change forever.

"A rollicking dispatch from the heartland as great plans are laid for a mega-highway just at the moment when America runs out of gas." ---James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere

"A compellingly written narrative that is not only hard to put down but is sweeping in its context. America's history, and its future, breathes in these pages." ---Ken Auletta, author Googled

"Interstate 69 is not just about highways. It's about Americans deciding on their future." ---Lawrence Wright, author of the Pulitzer Prize winner The Looming Tower

"This is an affectionate, hard-won, and skillfully-made book, filled with the pleasures of original discovery." ---Ian Frazier, author of Great Plains