This landmark collection of nearly 100 essays by New York Times journalist Dan Barry, selected from 10 years of his popular column entitled "This Land," presents a rarely-seen and profoundly powerful portrait of America, made up of shimmering snapshots of everyday people and places.
In 2010, while sipping a pint with his colleagues, New York Timescolumnist, Dan Barry, suggested writing a column about America. Not the America on the evening news or in the headlines on the homepage, but the America that is defined and redefined every day by the men and women who comprise it. Since then, Dan Barry has traversed the United States to report and write his widely acclaimed "This Land" column-the title plucked from Woody Guthrie's famous folk song-visiting all fifty states (in many cases, more than once). Over the past ten years, Dan has consistently delivered revelatory, provocative, and deeply affecting stories, each a window into our nation's forgotten institutions, its underrepresented subcultures, its hidden lives.Bringing together the best of Dan's ten-year odyssey-with select images shot by such extraordinary photographers as Angel Franco, Nicole Benigveno, and Todd Heisler-This Land will evoke the remarkable human richness and diversity of experience, the tensions, contradictions, and inequities, that make our country what it is. By assembling Dan's signature literary snapshots of American life, This Land will create a mosaic of our recent shared history, capturing how our nation is at once flawed and exceptional, backward and ascendant, as violent and cruel as it can be gentle and benevolent.
Industry Reviews
"Story to story, this collection of reportage from Dan Barry for The New York Times might appear to be what it is - old journalism. And yet, what is actually here, a decade of stories about crumbling traditions, breaks in trust and flickers of grace, is the most comprehensive single-book portrait of the United States (circa 2007-2016) in a long time. The accumulated power of these pieces - angry, corny, inspiring, mournful and insane - takes on the shape of a salute to durable, keenly observed newspaper writing."--The Chicago Tribune, 10 Best Books of 2018
"A fine collection of Barry's smooth-as-silk and keenly observed columns for the New York Times. He travels to post-Katrina New Orleans, witnesses an execution in Tennessee, talks with the minister who befriended serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Barry finds beauty in the tragic, the bizarre, the overlooked."--The Star Tribune
"This Land reminds us that the greatest strength of the American character is America's characters: men and women who are resilient, gracious, eccentric, world-weary, bright-eyed, funny, complex, tragic, surly and yes, even, kind. Dan Barry proves once again that in his intelligent company, attention paid is its own reward. He assures us, too, that eloquence, wit, and compassion - all the virtues we need now - have not been purged from American discourse and are alive and well in these pages."--Alice McDermott
"Dan Barry gives dignity even to the darkest corners of the American experience. He is the closest thing we have to a contemporary Steinbeck."--Colum McCann
"There is something incrementally, and in the end almost infinitely heartbreaking and transformational about Dan Barry's haunting anthology... With a Dickensian breadth of curiosity and compassion, Barry has been determined to shadow and record a decade in the quotidian flow of national life-events that are all the more indelible, mysterious and uncanny for their specificity."--Ric Burns
"Dan Barry is an American treasure, and This Land is a beautifully conceived, essential book on American lives and places. His understanding and love of the American experience-small towns, fractured lives, beauty, suffering, and the physical landscape-is unparalleled. I'm grateful to him, and for him, for chronicling our lives, honoring our history and recognizing our connection to each other."--Rosanne Cash
