With gentle humor, Hammond presents readers with the charms, aggravations, quirks, and disappointments of small-town life and frustrates any expectation that the past’s deepest lessons are simple. In Ohio States: A Twentieth-Century Midwestern, Jeffrey Hammond asserts the quiet mysteries of an ordinary life. More than simply a glimpse of life in the Midwest in the 1950s, this collection of well-crafted, touching narratives finds the author recalling his childhood and youth with a mixture of affection and alarm.