| THE BEAUTIFUL AND ENDURING OZARKS |
The Beautiful and Enduring Ozarks has a distinctly non-touristic perspective. Leland Payton’s photographs focus on wild rivers, back roads, villages, country churches, and farmers with sun-etched faces. Quotes from early explorers and geographers support his concept that the Ozarks has always been, and will likely remain, a cultural and ecological refuge from the changes that sweep over it. A reader praised the book as ”a crystallization, a naming of all that uniqueness as I find in the Ozarks…a modern classic.”
Payton has an especially soft spot for local color, such as the hill-country characters made famous in the paintings of native Ozarker Thomas Hart Benton and whose descendants are still very much a part of the landscape. This quirky book is every bit as iconoclastic as the people and places Payton writes about and photographs. – June Sawyers,
The book is beautifully written, illustrated and put together. It does an excellent job of providing an understanding of the Ozarks. It gives one a feeling for the true Ozarks. – Dr. Oscar (Oz) Hawksley,
The text is both laugh-out-loud funny and quietly tender. It’s the best way to show others (“fer’ners,” that is) what they’re missing in the Ozarks. – Kate Klise, journalist and author       |
