When politicians and pundits talk about the heartland, or the heart of the country, they are generally not thinking of places like Middletown, in Orange County, in the Hudson valley of New York State. Yet the people and the places gathered here sit right in the middle of a great many twenty-first-century American realities, and there is not so much as a whiff of polemic in these pictures: as the title suggests, the volume is full of what feel like genuine and compassionate encounters.