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“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, National Book Award–winning author
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“Dan Barry proves once again that in his intelligent company, attention paid is its own reward. Eloquence, wit, and compassion…are alive and well in these pages.”
— Alice McDermott, New York Times bestselling author
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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