Brian Reisinger’s “Land Rich Cash Poor” emerges as an anthem to the family farm in America, romanticized despite the never-ending work even in good times, which have been sparse in the last century.

The book follows a procession of efforts by other authors laboring to explain America’s farm troubles, but few are as lyrically written or as deeply and personally detailed. Reisinger was destined to become a fourth-generation farmer until he went off to college and decided his calling lay beyond the cows and fields of his family’s Wisconsin farm.

Increasingly since the first machines started to revolutionize agriculture, farmers have been driven to expand or sell, find niche products for their output, get second jobs in town or diversify their farm. A California farmer, for example, built an event center on his property and now hosts weddings and other gatherings. Absent the diversified income, the farmer would have been land rich but cash poor.

The book is well-sourced and bogs down only in the early going when Reisinger laments the loss of “our way of life” at least five times. But that’s a small nick on an otherwise polished takeout on what ails American farming outside the view of most consumers who only see the end result of farmers’ toil: Full grocery shelves.

The book also links the demise of the family farm in America with the rural- urban rift in America; small towns that supported groups of family farms often have shrunken as land-rich farmers sold out to escape becoming cash poor. Less compelling is Reisinger’s argument that the loss of family farms is destroying our capacity to feed ourselves; modern American corporate agriculture lacks the image of the happy family farm, but big-company farms clearly produce food in great quantities.

Still, the farm challenges that Reisinger chronicles remain serious and worthy of our elected officials’ attention. Don’t expect much though this election, given the volume of other issues we face. — Jeff Rowe, Associated Press

Pulitzer Prize laureate Emily Nussbaum delivers the skinny on MTV’s “The Real World” and other precedent-shattering programs in her quick- witted, brilliantly written “Cue the Sun!” The book chronicles reality television’s roots in the welter of postwar culture as well as its boom-and-bust cycles.

Nussbaum offers a treasure trove of anecdotes that seizes our attention like an action sequence, while asking incisive questions about a world increasingly scripted for consumption. She views the genre as “cinema verité filmmaking that has been cut with commercial contaminants, like a street drug, in order to slash the price and intensify the effect” — a mongrel form as American as us all.

Reality shows were originally set on radio, then inched into the new medium. Ronald Reagan’s election and the rise of the Moral Majority altered the calculus. Television became a weather vane, tugged by the contradictory ways the nation perceived itself. Hence the squeaky-clean image of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” and grittier “Cops.”

Nussbaum excavates the business narratives behind the stars, roving from executive suites to affluent zip codes to exotic locales. Her chapter on “An American Family,” which aired on PBS in 1973 and featured the fraying Loud family of Santa Barbara, California, limns larger social shifts, from queer liberation to feminist rage.

The ’90s saw a need for quirkier storytelling, soap-opera drama packaged for Gen X-hipsters and then a fresh category of gladiatorial contest.

Nussbaum’s deft reportage serves her well. She flavors cultural commentary with puns and slang.

“Cue the Sun!” is both vital history and entertainment bonanza, an ode to that most American of maxims: The show must go on. — Hamilton Cain, Minneapolis Star Tribune