I’m in the midst of reading “State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America” and I’m a little miffed.

When we got to Wichita one Saturday night, there were high-school kids cruising up and down the main drag, shouting things from car to car, and generally whooping it up. They really did that.

I’m pretty damn annoyed with the piece on Kansas by Jim Lewis. He fully admits only visiting the state once while following a band on tour, and it shows. Never, ever, have I found any “whooping” in my hometown. His piece continues its nosedive, fiercely first-person while eschewing any actual insight: “I want to tell you a story about Kansas, or rather, to tell you a story that Kansas once told about me.” There’s rambling about some “Kansas of the Mind,” many stories of stereotypical Midwesterners to belitte, and we finally reach the end: a bad imitation of Augusten Burrows or David Sedaris. Fooey.

Illinois, however, is fairly represented by Dave Eggers.

The slogan on all license plates in Illinois, for as long as anyone can remember, has been Land of Lincoln. Everyone in Illinois and all sensible people elsewhere believe it to be the best license-plate slogan of all the states in our union.

He winds through the history of Abraham Lincoln’s time in Illinois, reaching the logical conclusion that because of the great people who have originated from this strange state, our country would be unrecognizable if it had never existed. I tend to agree.

Fittingly, he addresses the mispronunciation of Illinois in “no nonsense” way: first offense, $50,000 fine; second offense, vocal cord scraping. And don’t let it happen four times, for execution awaits! Eggers ends his piece with a “kindness of strangers” anecdote, where he runs out of gas on the downstate jaunt from Chicago to Champaign, and the chills are replaced with warm, fuzzy feelings toward Illinoisans.

But my favorite so far is Alexander Payne’s entry on Nebraska. A close neighbor of Kansas, I was mostly a stranger to the state until my friend Micah moved there for a newspaper job. Now I’ve grown to really like the place; desolation, conservatism and all. Payne’s introduction:

The WPA’s Nebraska: A Guide to the Cornhusker State begins this way and is a good place to start: “The traveler crossing Nebraska gets an impression of broad fields, deep skies, wind, and sunlight; clouds racing over prairie swells; herds of cattle grazing on the sandhills; red barns and white farmhouses surrounded by fields of tasseling corn and ripening wheat; windmills and wire fences; and men and women who take their living form the soil.”

That the first words invoke the traveler rather than the Nebraskan himself captures how Americans have been thinking about the place for over 200 years – as somewhere to travel through, not to.

But that Unicameral legislative house, what a beauty! The only state in the union that went this unconventional route, a freak show in a country of  two-house political landscapes. That should be enough to send you running into Nebraska.

He fully admits that he’s writing with the perspective afforded from his hometown of Omaha, which could arguably be the same as writing about America from New York. But Payne is all-in, gung-ho about the positives despite facts that gambling is prohibited and strip clubs must require pasties. He’s proud and does his best to show the essence of Nebraskans.

If only Payne had grown up in Kansas. We deserve a better entry.