IrishCentral’s Book Club pick for December will take us on a journey across America.

Welcome to December’s pick for the IrishCentral Monthly Book Club! Each month we will pick a new Irish book or a great book from an Irish author and celebrate the amazing ability of the Irish to tell a good story.

Throughout December, we’ll be taking a journey across America with Dan Barry in “This Land: America, Lost and Found.”

This year’s Grand Marshal at the St. Pat’s for All parade in Queens, Dan Barry is a renowned New York Times columnist and two-time Pulitzer-Prize nominee.

He has traveled all 50 U.S. states with his “This Land” column which he started in 2007 and reported extensively on many topics, including the World Trade Center disaster and its aftermath and the damage to the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Barry has been the City Hall bureau chief, the Long Island bureau chief, a sportswriter, a general assignment reporter, and, for three years, the “About New York” columnist – all for the Times - while also penning four books.

In 1994, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for exposing corruption in the Rhode Island court system and was a finalist again in 2006 and 2010.

With a new book announcement on the first day of each month, stay with us throughout the month as we talk to the authors and give you a chance to discuss some great Irish works. The best way to stay in touch with us and other book club members is to join our dedicated Facebook group here, where you can leave your comments and questions or give us some more great Irish recommendations.

If you have any further comments, questions for the author or recommendations for a future IrishCentral Book of the Month, you can email us at books@irishcentral.com.  

You can purchase “This Land: America, Lost and Found” here.

IrishCentral’s December Book of the Month: “This Land: America, Lost and Found”

Author/Editor: Dan Barry.  

Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal

Genre: Nonfiction / Social Science / Essays

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 the author: Dan Barry is a journalist and author. In addition to sharing a Pulitzer Prize with former colleagues at The Providence Journal, Dan has received, among countless other accolades, a George Polk Award; an American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for deadline reporting (for his coverage of the first anniversary of Sept. 11); a Mike Berger Award for in-depth human interest reporting; and the PEN/ESPN Literary Award for Sports Writing. He lives in New York.  

You can purchase “This Land: America, Lost and Found” here.

Be sure to join the IrishCentral Book Club group here or to send us an email with questions at books@irishcentral.com.