The Zone

The Zone: True Tales From The Heartland (2021), the fascinating new non-fiction paperback from author/historian Mark Zimmerman, takes you on a journey back through space and time as a Boomer recollects his childhood and surviving the Sixties and the Cold War. This 300-page collection of 50 odd illustrated chapters of American history focuses on Middle America, specifically the Midwest and Mid-South, with reports on pastimes such as football, iceboating, setting weird endurance records, sock monkeys and skydiving Santas, the study of corpses, nuclear-powered aircraft and the Flying Crowbar, the blues guitar duel that Jimmy Hendrix lost, Las Vegas by the numbers, Nazi saboteurs, invasion by Patton's tanks and war maneuvers, glass jar tycoons, building the atomic bomb, constructing the world's largest gunpowder plant, the mighty cornfield shipyard, the most powerful machine on or off Earth, Florida's only battlefield, stuntmen buried alive or suspended in space, abandoned space debris, the crypt of civilization, a frugal Congressman and other oddities, the nastiest curmudgeons, feuds and gunfights, downtown assassination, deadly duels, frontier massacres, bushwhackers, gunboats versus cavalry, pioneer ironworks plantations, the history of executions, genius general of the gridiron, murders during wartime, range wars, miners versus militia, possum hunters versus hillbillies, utopian dreamers versus reality, the life of a sitcom psychologist, the legacy of Chief Oshkosh, the history of rock 'n roll, and last but not least, a concise history of the Sixties as illuminated by the Beatles, the astronauts, the Vietnam War, and the Green Bay Packers. Be forewarned, once you've started reading, you have entered The Zone.