This Land, Dan Barry
This Land, Dan Barry
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This Land
America, Lost and Found

Author: Dan Barry

Narrator: Allan Robertson, Janina Edwards, Dan Barry

Unabridged: 12 hr 26 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/11/2018

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included

Synopsis

A landmark collection by New York Times journalist Dan Barry, selected from a decade of his distinctive "This Land" columns and presenting a powerful but rarely seen portrait of America.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and on the eve of a national recession, New York Times writer Dan Barry launched a column about America: not the one populated only by cable-news pundits, but the America defined and redefined by those who clean the hotel rooms, tend the beet fields, endure disasters both natural and manmade. As the name of the president changed from Bush to Obama to Trump, Barry was crisscrossing the country, filing deeply moving stories from the tiniest dot on the American map to the city that calls itself the Capital of the World.

Complemented by the select images of award-winning Times photographers, these narrative and visual snapshots of American life create a majestic tapestry of our shared experience, capturing how our nation is at once flawed and exceptional, paralyzed and ascendant, as cruel and violent as it can be gentle and benevolent.

About Dan Barry

Dan Barry is a reporter and columnist for the New York Times. In 1994 he was part of an investigative team at the Providence Journal that won the Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles on Rhode Island’s justice system. He is the author of a memoir, a collection of his About New York columns, and Bottom of the 33rd, for which he won the 2012 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Maplewood, New Jersey.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Siobhan on November 03, 2018

These are the stories I want to read about America right now: specific individual and true stories, not politically motivated in either direction, not stories of famous people or politicians. I've heard so many people asking in the last year "What is going to heal America and bring us together as one......more

Goodreads review by Laura on February 14, 2024

I am unsure where to start in this disappointing review of an even more disappointing book. I had very high hopes for this one and quickly picked it up off of my shelf when it came time to decide which book to read next. What I found within the pages were the writings of an author who failed to keep......more

Goodreads review by OutlawPoet on July 15, 2019

This Land is a portrait of America, made up of small portraits of ordinary people. Some of the stories are hopeful - others heartbreaking. However, all of them together give us a mosaic of America often missed when watching partisan stores on the news or bite sized items on Twitter. The book does leav......more

Goodreads review by Kathy on July 21, 2019

Dan Barry’s book, THIS LAND - America, Lost and Found, is a collection of poignant vignettes that beautifully capture this eclectic country of ours. Finishing the last page, I hugged the book to my chest and wistfully said, “I love this book. I didn’t want it to end.” (My husband, never quite sure h......more

Goodreads review by Barry on March 07, 2019

This is a series of newspaper columns - stories, really - that ran in the New York Times from 2007 to 2017. So, for the timeline, think the end of Bush the younger's presidency, through the Obama years and the Great Recession, and then the beginning of Trump. And while it's not really political, the......more

Quotes

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

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