Dreamland: Travels Inside Roswell and Area 51
  • " A mind-opening tale of trespass and revelation, of road adventures, technothriller hardware, saucer folks and aerospace outlaws--as well as a daring account of the haunting of our history through the Cold War and beyond by what we have seen, and often wish we had not seen, in the hazardous dreamscape of the American sky." --Thomas Pynchon
  • ". . . a brilliant book in which nothing is as it seems, while everything has a rational explanation, and yet, even so, the 'rational' is its own sort of Dracula." -- John Leonard , The Nation, June 15, 1998
  • "Thomas Pynchon meets Hunter S. Thompson (stylistically) in a novelistic account of the U.S. government's secret air base known as 'Area 51.' . . .Patton. . . .travels beyond the physical location of Area 51 to the psychic location of those who must believe that in the sky exists a world we are not meant to know. . . A fascinating meditation on delusion and desire, this is an American tale." --Kirkus Reviews July 1, 1998
  • "This eloquent and frequently astounding book takes readers along on an audacious, circuitous exploration of the desert landscape in an around the most secret military bases in the American West, and of the psychological landscape of fantasy, lore, and suspicion that surrounds them."
  • "While Area 51 has already gotten lots of ink and airtime, technology reporter Phil Patton has produced the definitive account of this strange corner of the world and of an even stranger corner of the national psyche. (He) brilliantly analyzes"and "vividly reconstructs the real story"; "the larger connections he draws are invariably precise--and unforgettable." -- Outside, August, 1998
  • "A rare literary work" --Jon Katz, HotWired
Made in USA: The Secret Histories of the Things that Made America
A Book of the Month Club Book
  • "With a digger's curiosity and a poet’s pen he has done for the lowest artifacts of life--from easy chairs to the computer mouse--what Hemingway did for the sentence, what Picasso did for the color blue, what John Waters did for polyester."-- The Baltimore Sun
  • "The Margaret Mead of ordinary things,"-- New York magazine
  • "Patton is a Mr. Peabody of relevant information about distinctly American things." --Esquire
  • "Informative and entertaining," -- Witold Rybcyznski
Open Road: A Celebration of the American Highway
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
  • Forbes: "everything a book on such a fascinating subject should be...lyrical and historical, humorously evocative and penetratingly perceptive"
  • Playboy: "insightful and witty...makes you look again, and with fresh eyes, at something that has always been there."
  • Barron's: " Like John McPhee and Tracy Kidder...Patton has an extraordinary ability to breathe life into the mundane and inanimate."
  • New York Times Book Review, Karal Ann Marling: "Put Mr. Patton's lovely little book in the glove compartment of your Toyota and point west...."
Voyager (with Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager)
  • "Voyager is sure to take its place among the enduring classics of adventure literature" --Janet Guthrie, Washington Post Book World
  • A genuinely epic adventure that's well and truly told. --Kirkus

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