David Lamb is a remarkable reporter and story teller. His passion is the people of America - their histories, their lives, the dramas that absorb them. In his hands, these people become figures in a coherent, compelling frieze of America in the late twentieth century. In David Lamb's America, people greet each new day with a kind of gritty realism, steadfastly optimistic in the face of disappointments, large and small. This is an original and colorful look at ordinary Americans whose lives are vastly different from those of their urban counterparts. They are rendered extraordinary by David Lamb's stunning reportorial gifts. A Sense of Place is about cowboy poets, hobos, farmers, and ranchers struggling on the land they adore. It's about small towns that have lost many of their children to the cities but doggedly hang on. With David Lamb as our guide, we journey to isolated reaches of Idaho, North Dakota, and Montana, where the nearest neighbor can be fifty miles away and the inhabitants speak unabashedly about their love of a threatened way of life. In the eyes of the men and women he meets as he travels the length and breadth of that neglected portion of the country he calls "the empty quarter," we remain a young nation, though we are no longer youthful. Our exuberance, he finds, has been tempered by caution. In countless conversations from Maine to Alaska, Americans speak of a bittersweet longing for the past, as though no one knows quite what to make of the social and economic upheavals that have swept across the land. Yet no one David Lamb encounters talks of wanting to turn back the clock. They talk about community and holding on to all that is good and their search for what one New England mill worker calls "the comfort zone" of life. In his introduction, David Lamb states his intentions clearly. "My intent," he says, "is not to dwell on political issues or to recite a litany of national problems. Rather, I look on A Sense of Place as a deliberately selective and personalized portrait of America and some of her people. This is a book about what happens to the pioneer spirit when the last frontier has been settled." A Sense of Place is about the American outback, once exploited for its natural resources and now caught between survival in its original form and selling out to freeways, fast food, and shattered values. It is an unforgettable portrait of a ubiquitous and too often invisible America seldom celebrated - haunting, poignant, and proud.

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