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Introduction: Richard Rhodes' Farm
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16512 |
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BOOK WORLD
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11 / 1989 |
413 Words |
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"Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God". When Thomas Jefferson wrote those words, he was likely pronouncing a self-evident truth: America was then a nation of God-fearing, land-loving farmers who assumed that tilling the soil and virtue went hand in hand. So much has changed in two centuries that to Americans born in the city, farming has become nearly as mysterious as nuclear physics. Which may be why historian Richard Rhodes, who demystified modern physics with his Pulitzer Prize-winning work, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, has now turned his remarkable powers of observation onto a Missouri farm family.
Farm, excerpted in the following pages, is an intimate portrait of Tom Bauer, his wife, Sally, and their three children over a recent one-year period, as they struggle to wrest a living from their one thousand acres of cropland. From planting wheat to harvesting corn, from birthing calves to spotting deer, Rhodes reveals the excitement and earthy satisfaction of farming's immense, fascinating reality. Gradually, a picture of the family's life-sustaining virtues emerges: fierce self-reliance, a boundless capacity for hard work, and a willingness to sacrifice for family, friends, and community that can only be called exemplary. But Farm also shows the daunting complexity of today's agriculture--Bauer is obliged to master high-tech machinery, sophisticated chemicals, genetics, and a bewildering array of government regulations.
Following the excerpt are essay responses from poet Tom Montag and farm-policy analyst James Bovard. Montag, a onetime farmer, gives an overview of the book and comments from a farmer's point of view. It should be instructive, he tells us, that in a world where people die on city
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