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Richard Rhodes ListingsIf you cannot find what you want on this page, then please use our search feature to search all our listings. Click on Title to view full description
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Richard Rhodes Farm: A Year in the Life of an American Farmer
0671636472 / 9780671636470 Hardbound
Farm: A Year in the Life of an American FarmerFarm lyrically recounts a year in the lives of Tom and Sally Bauer, solid Midwesterners who work the bottomlands of the Missouri River to grow "a harvest few city people could have identified ... the foundation of their diet, the principal food plant of the Western world": corn. The two rise before dawn in all kinds of weather, tending to the hundreds of tasks farmers must master in the face of heavy odds--foreclosures, climbing interest rates, a then-sickening economy, and, always, the uncertainties of the weather and the health of their crops. Richard Rhodes makes it clear that their lives are hard, but the Bauers love to till the soil. Doubtless few urbanites will want to don bib overalls after reading Farm, but anyone who reads the book will appreciate the difficulty of farmers' lives and the courage of those who lead them. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Publishers Weekly To write this book, Rhodes, whose The Making of the Atomic Bomb won the NBA, NBCC and Pulitzer prizes, spent almost a year on the family farm in central Missouri owned by the pseudonymous 46-year-old Tom Bauer. Meticulous, exhaustive, at times excessive descriptions illumine the planting and harvesting of corn, soybeans and wheat; the mechanics of farm machinery and finances; hog and cattle breeding and castration; the farmer's battles with government controls, imperatives of grain companies and nature; and farmer camaraderie (mostly male, the female farmer is a rarity in Missouri). Rhodes generally affects the no-nonsense, unadorned tone of the farmers, but his occasional lyricisms are not inappropriate, even when portraying the bustle of a farrowing house, the farm's financial core. "There were pigs everywhere, pigs standing on their mothers' backs, pigs' heads lined up along a row of teats, pigs squealing and scratching, and more to come, into a dimly lit world where the air was mellow night and day with country-Western songs." Readers will not fail to appreciate the monumental achievement of the independent farmer, but they will remain curious about the experiences of the author who masks himself behind a third-person narration. BOMC featured alternate.
Price:
1.00 USD
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