Journalist Tom Brokaw's hymn of praise to South Dakota, small towns, sweat equity, and family tells about "growing up in the American heartland in the Forties and Fifties," and takes readers from the author's birth in 1940 to 1962, when he "put (his) home state of South Dakota in a rearview mirror and drove away.

It is a marvelous celebration, a fulsome hymn of praise and confidence, yet also personal, even intimate.

It is in the month of May that we celebrate the Visitation, when Mary greets her cousin Elizabeth with this incomparably beautiful hymn of praise to the all-loving God, whose ways are not our ways: "He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly/He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.