The plans called for creating the Caesar Creek Lake reservoir, which would flood the small farming village of New Burlington, Ohio.

He moved into an abandoned farmhouse left behind and spent the next year living and working with the people while collecting their stories and histories.

In each chapter, Baskin weaves the words of the residents together with collected letters and diaries from the past, and threads of his own observations running throughout.

Harrison Salisbury at The New York Times wrote “a better eulogy to real American people has never been written,” and Roger Velhust at Newsday said, “What Baskin has done is preserve the heritage not merely of one small town, but of the American village that no more than a few generations ago was home to almost all of us.” The renowned psychiatrist and author Robert Coles wrote in The New Yorker that New Burlington’s “…landscape, its people, and their traditions and customs, their experiences, victories, and defeats, and their abiding memories have been given new life in this rare moral document written by an imaginative observer.”[2] Many reviewers noted the unique poetic and literary tone of the book.

In 2006, the book was adopted into a play by Jonathan Walker and performed at the Chautauqua Institute featuring Emmy Award-winning actress Sada Thompson.