• Great Lakes Book Award, General Books; Great Lakes Booksellers Association
• Chicago Book Clinic “award of excellence”
• Excerpted in America West magazine
This stunning collection of photographs uncovers the mystery and beauty of a part of the country that for most people is hidden in plain view.
These are unexpected images of a Midwest that has borne cultivation and yet retains the marks of its primeval origins. Presenting a counterpoint of vast expanse and luminous detail, Places of Grace reveals both the physical beauty and the natural history of a ten-state region encompassing Illinois, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. Gary Irving’s extraordinary photographs and Michal Strutin’s elegant prose combine to create a penetrating and vivid sense of place.
From the sculpted sandstone of Ohio’s Hocking Hills to the prairie grasses of western Nebraska to the boreal forests of Michigan’s upper peninsula, Places of Grace celebrates the rich visual texture and fascinating past of the heartland.
Reviews
“Gary Irving’s extraordinary photographs and Michal Strutin’s elegant prose combine to create a penetrating and vivid sense of place in Places of Grace…Presenting a counterpoint of vast expanse and luminous detail, this sumptuous volume makes you want to venture out into the land and return to the book.”
—Great Lakes Booksellers Association
“It is difficult to say which is more stirring—Strutin’s elegant prose or Irving’s inspiring photographs. In the end, it doesn’t matter. For what they leave me is a landscape of long-swirling grasses, leaf-tangled streams, imposing bluffs, and darkly reflective lakes, a sublime solitude in which even Wordsworth would have felt at home.”
—Virginia Quarterly Review
