This Place, These People: Life and Shadow on the Great Plains
I was very moved by this evocative, literate, and informative book. Warner's beautiful -- and painful -- photographs are a perfect companion to Stark's writing and the 'voices' of the Nebraskans that are included. I am very grateful for this sensitive and sad look back.(Ruth Silverman, former associate curator of the International Center of Photography and two-time winner of the Photography-Book-of-the-Year award forThe DogandAthletes)The photographs and the words so beautifully preserved here evoke powerful -- and indeed painful -- memories of the homes left behind when millions of rural Americans packed up, said good-bye to all they had known, and relocated to the nation's cities and suburbs. The memory of that transition continues for many of us, tearing at our hearts.(Robert Wuthnow, author ofRemaking the Heartland: Middle America Since the 1950s)This Place, These Peoplemakes the forgotten and the ordinary sacred. The photos are breathtaking; the interviews as homey and nourishing as rice and beans. Every picture and quotation is revelatory and poignant. I'd like to give this book to almost everyone I know.(Mary Pipher, author ofThe Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture)This marvelous book offers us a glimpse of the ghost of the Great Plains as it makes a last appearance. We ought to be immensely grateful to David Stark and Nancy Warner for inviting us to their deeply moving séance.(Ted Kooser, former U.S. Poet Laureate)These resonant photographs and recollections evoke a world almost gone from American life. They are as filled with time as old monuments, and as moving.(Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author)Warner's exquisite and haunting images are like memory itself: fragments that the imagination weaves together into a meaningful whole.(Martha Casanave, photographer)Richly nuanced.(Publishers Weekly)A melancholy, touching look at a vanishing way of life.(Sarah Bryan MillerSt. Louis Post-Dispatch)Each photo presents a snapshot of a place vacated. Together, they tell a larger story of an America fading into the landscape.... Conversations, captured by Stark, are sprinkled throughout the book, bringing insight and understated humor to the inanimate beauty of Warner's photographs.(Casey LoganThe Omaha World Herald)