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Bezig met laden... Mapping the Farm: The Chronicle of a Family (Borealis (Saint Paul, Minn.).) (editie 2001)door John Hildebrand
Informatie over het werkMapping The Farm: The Chronicle of a Family door John Hildebrand
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Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. An intimate and affectionate history of a family farm in Minnesota, belonging to the author’s father- and mother-in-law, is also the history of The American Family Farm writ small. It was interesting enough to keep a reader’s attention from the early days of homesteading in the 19th century through the uncertainty of passing the farm down to a new generation in the 21st century. I had trouble keeping all the characters in the saga straight, and searched in vain for a family tree to look up the names and relationships. The dust jacket, brilliantly, unfolds into maps and illustrations which supplement the photos in the book – but that effect is so subtle that I didn’t realize until after I finished the book. No family tree is hiding in the dust jacket either. Beautiful, a quiet pleasure. More of an homage than a polemic. though it is often sad because families like this one are losing their farms to the corporations. Recommended by [a:Michael Perry|2772479|Michael Perry|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1231631186p2/2772479.jpg] (iirc, in [b:Truck: A Love Story|73967|Truck A Love Story|Michael Perry|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347489750s/73967.jpg|71564]) and worthy (but not as poetic as Perry's writing, nor does it include humor as Perry's works do). Interesting, although like many farming books all of the interesting observations are in the first chapter. Still a good book to read. "Place names on farms are often shorthand versions of stories for who owned what or how it was used. To know the stories is to understand where you are in the world, and to know that is to understand who you are." "...the land could not be explained apart from the people who farmed it." 2803 Mapping the Farm: The Chronicle of a Family, by John Hildebrand (read 25 Nov 1995) This is about the author's wife's family and the family farm near Rochester, Minnesota. It sounds true and is very poignant at times. I was really amazed, however, that the author, a teacher at the University of Wisconsin, apparently is unfamiliar with simple English words like excrement, defecate, urine, urinate, and fouled-up, and had to resort to gutter language to express himself. The blurb says the book is in the tradition of such American classics as Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac and Wallace Stegner's Wolf Willow--books I have not read but would like to. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
Prijzen
"In the vastness of the Upper Midwest, the fields and farms can inevitably begin to look the same. Yet each enterprise is like a small country, with its own particular history and culture. By chronicling a single family's tenure on the land, John Hildebrand here gives us an extraordinary survey, at once panoramic and intimate, of one family's farm over more than a century - and a moving account of a vanishing way of life." "The family is Hildebrand's wife Sharon's, and the farm is 240 acres of pristine cropland near Rochester, Minnesota. O'Neills have farmed this place since 1880, when their Irish immigrant ancestors headed west; but now, after four generations, the future is uncertain. Still, the family farm remains one version of the original American dream, and this book recounts a singular clan's struggle to keep that dream alive." "This is the story of good times and hardships and revolutionary changes; of livestock auctions and county fairs; of weddings, funerals, and the rituals of country life by which half of all Americans used to live, and a dwindling few still do. We follow the seasonal cycle of chores as crops are planted, weather is watched, cows are bred, and unpredictable events interrupt the everyday routine. And we see how the O'Neills have made this place their home, how as a nation we've changed, what we've learned, what we've lost."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)977.6History and Geography North America Midwestern U.S. MinnesotaLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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The narrative is filled with memorable vignettes but suffers from an overall murkiness of purpose. The title, for example, doesn't really capture what is going on here. Hildebrand wants to provide an alternative to the typical ways in which land is mapped (aerial surveys, land-use maps, etc.) by making us see the people on the land and the texture of the land itself. As he notes at one point, most of us see farmland only as we blast past it on a freeway, and "The anonymity of farmland is what makes it so easily converted to other purposes" (chiefly strip malls and butt-ugly housing developments. But the story here is scattered, the various members of the family sometimes hard to keep straight (a basic family tree would have been an enormous help), and the overall intent of this project isn't clear. It isn't really a re-mapping in even a metaphorical sense. He seems to want to avoid an elegiac tone, and yet that is probably the best characterization of the book. Maps are fundamentally tools designed to help us do something but it isn't clear what either Hildebrand or we are supposed to do with this remapped map. ( )