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 of Remaking the Heartland: Middle America Since the 1950s This Place, These People makes 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 of The 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 seance. -- 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