Every Farm Tells a Story


Book Description

Jerry Apps details the virtues and hardships of rural living. “Do your chores without complaining. Show up on time. Do every job well. Always try to do better. Never stop learning. Next year will be better. Care for others, especially those who have less than you. Accept those who are different from you. Love the land.” In this paperback edition of a beloved Jerry Apps classic, the rural historian captures the heart and soul of life in rural America. Inspired by his mother’s farm account books—in which she meticulously recorded every farm purchase—Jerry chronicles life on a small farm during and after World War II. Featuring a new introduction exclusive to this 2nd edition, Every Farm Tells a Story reminds us that, while our family farms are shrinking in number, the values learned there remain deeply woven in our cultural heritage.




Gaining Ground


Book Description

With humor and pathos, Forrest Pritchard recounts his ambitious and often hilarious endeavors to save his family’s seventh-generation farm in the Shenandoah Valley. Through many a trial and error, he not only saves Smith Meadows from insolvency but turns it into a leading light in the sustainable, grass-fed, organic farm-to-market community. There is nothing young Farmer Pritchard won’t try. Whether he’s selling firewood and straw, raising free-range chickens and hogs, or acquiring a flock of Barbados Blackbelly sheep, his learning curve is steep and always entertaining. Pritchard’s world crackles with colorful local characters—farm hands, butchers, market managers, customers, fellow vendors, pet goats, policemen—bringing the story to warm, communal life. His most important ally, however, is his renegade father, who initially questions his son's career choice and eschews organic foods for the generic kinds that wreak havoc on his health. Soon after his father’s death, the farm becomes a recognized success and Pritchard must make a vital decision: to continue serving the local community or answer the exploding demand for his wares with lucrative Internet sales and shipping deals. More than a charming story of honest food cultivation and farmers’ markets, Gaining Ground tugs on the heartstrings, reconnecting us to the land and the many lives that feed us.




Fields of Plenty


Book Description

"Fields of Plenty is the memoir of respected farmer, writer, and photographer Michael Ableman as he and his son travel from his own farm in British Columbia across the United States in search of innovative and passionate farmers who are making a difference in what we eat and how we experience food. From California to New York, this story captures the essence of each farmer's vision, the spirit of the land that they work, and the beauty and flavors of the foods that they lovingly produce. Ableman's odyssey takes him to a melon grower who is "militant about flavor," sheep-cheese producers who have built their own culturing caves, an urban farmer growing heirloom tomatoes for market on abandoned lots, and others who are trying to answer the complex questions of sustenance philosophically and, most important, practically." "Fields of Plenty is a hopeful memoir that reveals the larger issues of food in a modern world. Illustrated with Ableman's photographs and flavored with recipes that feature each farmer's bounty, Fields of Plenty is an intimate portrait of food and agriculture at a critical crossroads."--BOOK JACKET.




Harris and Me


Book Description

A cloth bag containing ten copies of the title.




Limping through Life


Book Description

Limping through Life A Farm Boy’s Polio Memoir Jerry Apps “Families throughout the United States lived in fear of polio throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, and now the disease had come to our farm. I can still remember that short winter day and the chilly night when I first showed symptoms. My life would never be the same.” —from the Introduction Polio was epidemic in the United States starting in 1916. By the 1930s, quarantines and school closings were becoming common, as isolation was one of the only ways to fight the disease. The Sauk vaccine was not available until 1955; in that year, Wisconsin’s Fox River valley had more polio cases per capita than anywhere in the United States. In his most personal book, Jerry Apps, who contracted polio at age twelve, reveals how the disease affected him physically and emotionally, profoundly influencing his education, military service, and family life and setting him on the path to becoming a professional writer. A hardworking farm kid who loved playing softball, young Jerry Apps would have to make many adjustments and meet many challenges after that winter night he was stricken with a debilitating, sometimes fatal illness. In Limping through Life he explores the ways his world changed after polio and pays tribute to those family members, teachers, and friends who helped him along the way.




Farm Story


Book Description

Eddie Casson grew up on a farm in a small Indiana town where Church, family, and identity were the unchanging signposts of an acceptable life. Conventionality was more than just expected--it was the highest form of success. Art, music, and movies might have their place here and there, but bonus was for boys to excel at traditional masculine pursuits. Despite always feeling somehow different and apart from most of everyone else around him, he worked hard to be the perfect image of a son, brother, and friend. Reared in a household where perfection and faith were the two pillars of the family, he struggled to understand his own identity as well as the currents of unhappiness--and change--that were beginning to swirl around him and the outside world. Finding his way out of the straight jacket of his past into a different kind of future was a long rock-covered road. He would find that his choices would hurt people he loved along the way, but he also knew that living his true life would be the only thing that would make it all worth it. And with a loving and forgiving heart, he would be able to find his way back to people he loved while stumbling forward into his own happier future. This book is a memoir about growing up in Indiana in the '60s and '70s as a gay kid and young man. It is a series of linked portraits and moments that weave the story through. Eddie worked to really create a sense of what it was like in these particular places in the particular time. The Midwest in those days had barely entered the modern era and his youth and life had a truly gothic, otherworldly cast to it. It conveys not just the struggles of his experience, but the poetry and soulfulness of it as well.




A Good Day's Work


Book Description

Dwight Hoover, who grew up on an Iowa farm, recalls the events of day-to-day life in this era, offering detailed descriptions of daily work in each of the year's four seasons. A fascinating if grim reminder of what it was like to be a child with adult responsibilities, Mr. Hoover's unusual memoir recalls the rough edges as well as the happy moments of rural life.




Farm Anatomy


Book Description

Learn the difference between a farrow and a barrow, and what distinguishes a weanling from a yearling. Country and city mice alike will delight in Julia Rothman’s charming illustrated guide to the curious parts and pieces of rural living. Dissecting everything from the shapes of squash varieties to how a barn is constructed and what makes up a beehive to crop rotation patterns, Rothman gives a richly entertaining tour of the quirky details of country life.




Snowball's Chance


Book Description

This unauthorized companion to George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a controversial parable about September 11th by one of fiction’s most inventive and provocative writers Written in 14 days shortly after the September 11th attacks, Snowball’s Chance is an outrageous and unauthorized companion to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, in which exiled pig Snowball returns to the farm, takes charge, and implements a new world order of untrammeled capitalism. Orwell’s “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” has morphed into the new rallying cry: “All animals are born equal—what they become is their own affair.” A brilliant political satire and literary parody, John Reed’s Snowball’s Chance caused an uproar on publication in 2002, denounced by Christopher Hitchens, and barely dodging a lawsuit from the Orwell estate. Now, a decade later, with America in wars on many fronts, readers can judge anew the visionary truth of Reed’s satirical masterpiece.




Firefly Lane


Book Description

From the New York Times bestselling author Kristin Hannah comes a powerful novel of love, loss, and the magic of friendship. . . . now a #1 Netflix series! In the turbulent summer of 1974, Kate Mularkey has accepted her place at the bottom of the eighth-grade social food chain. Then, to her amazement, the "coolest girl in the world" moves in across the street and wants to be her friend. Tully Hart seems to have it all---beauty, brains, ambition. On the surface they are as opposite as two people can be: Kate, doomed to be forever uncool, with a loving family who mortifies her at every turn. Tully, steeped in glamour and mystery, but with a secret that is destroying her. They make a pact to be best friends forever; by summer's end they've become TullyandKate. Inseparable. So begins Kristin Hannah's magnificent new novel. Spanning more than three decades and playing out across the ever-changing face of the Pacific Northwest, Firefly Lane is the poignant, powerful story of two women and the friendship that becomes the bulkhead of their lives. From the beginning, Tully is desperate to prove her worth to the world. Abandoned by her mother at an early age, she longs to be loved unconditionally. In the glittering, big-hair era of the eighties, she looks to men to fill the void in her soul. But in the buttoned-down nineties, it is television news that captivates her. She will follow her own blind ambition to New York and around the globe, finding fame and success . . . and loneliness. Kate knows early on that her life will be nothing special. Throughout college, she pretends to be driven by a need for success, but all she really wants is to fall in love and have children and live an ordinary life. In her own quiet way, Kate is as driven as Tully. What she doesn't know is how being a wife and mother will change her . . . how she'll lose sight of who she once was, and what she once wanted. And how much she'll envy her famous best friend. . . . For thirty years, Tully and Kate buoy each other through life, weathering the storms of friendship---jealousy, anger, hurt, resentment. They think they've survived it all until a single act of betrayal tears them apart . . . and puts their courage and friendship to the ultimate test. Firefly Lane is for anyone who ever drank Boone's Farm apple wine while listening to Abba or Fleetwood Mac. More than a coming-of-age novel, it's the story of a generation of women who were both blessed and cursed by choices. It's about promises and secrets and betrayals. And ultimately, about the one person who really, truly knows you---and knows what has the power to hurt you . . . and heal you. Firefly Lane is a story you'll never forget . . . one you'll want to pass on to your best friend.