Total Loss Farm: A Year in the Life

Total Loss Farm: A Year in the Life
Author: Raymond Mungo
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2014-06-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1940436044

In making her selection for Pharos Editions, Dana Spiotta tells us how drawn she was by the work of Raymond Mungo. "[He] writes . . . about his own joy and his own pain, he is particularly good when he describes the land around him and how it feels on his body." Indeed, if Henry David Thoreau had downed a handful of liberty caps before penning Walden it would have read much like Mungo's Total Loss Farm, a rollicking memoir of the late 1960's back–to–the–earth movement. Written in a limber prose style formed by the tempo of the times, Mungo takes us into the cultural tsunami of a failed radical politics as it broke on the shoals of a drug–fueled personal freedom and washed inland across the farmlands of Vermont, leaving a trail of damage and redemption in its wake. Total Loss Farm attracted widespread critical and commercial attention in 1970, when the "back–to–the–land" hippie commune movement first emerged. The book's first section, "Another Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers," appeared as the cover article in the May 1970 issue of Atlantic Monthly. The hardcover first edition from Dutton was quickly followed by paperback editions from Bantam, Avon, and Madrona Publishers, keeping the book in print for several decades. Very recently, Dwight Garner in the New York Times Book Review cited Total Loss Farm as "the best and also the loopiest of the commune books."

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
Author: Barbara Kingsolver
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 403
Release: 2009-10-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0061795836

Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver returns with her first nonfiction narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat. "As the U.S. population made an unprecedented mad dash for the Sun Belt, one carload of us paddled against the tide, heading for the Promised Land where water falls from the sky and green stuff grows all around. We were about to begin the adventure of realigning our lives with our food chain. "Naturally, our first stop was to buy junk food and fossil fuel. . . ." Hang on for the ride: With characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that's better for the neighborhood and also better on the table. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life and diversified farms at the center of the American diet. "This is the story of a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew . . . and of how our family was changed by our first year of deliberately eating food produced from the same place where we worked, went to school, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air." Includes an excerpt from Flight Behavior.

Total Loss Farm

Total Loss Farm
Author: Raymond Mungo
Publisher: Madrona Pub
Total Pages: 181
Release: 1970
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9780914842163

Once Upon a Farm

Once Upon a Farm
Author: Rory Feek
Publisher: HarperChristian + ORM
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2018-06-19
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 078521674X

National Bestseller Sometimes it’s not only what we plant but where we’re planted. Now raising their four-year-old daughter, Indiana, alone, after Joey’s passing, Rory Feek digs deeper into the soil of his life and the unusual choices he and his wife, Joey, made together and the ones he’s making now to lead his family into the future. When Rory Feek and his older daughters moved into a run-down farmhouse almost twenty years ago, he had no idea of the almost fairy-tale love story that was going to unfold on that small piece of Tennessee land . . . and the lessons he and his family would learn along the way. Now two years after Joey’s passing, as Rory takes their four-year-old daughter Indiana’s hand and walks forward into an unknown future, he takes readers on his incredible journey from heartbreak to hope and, ultimately, the kind of healing that comes only through faith. A raw and vulnerable look deeper into Rory’s heart, Once Upon a Farm is filled with powerful stories of love, life, and hope and the insights that one extraordinary, ordinary man in bib overalls has gleamed along the way. As opposed to homesteading, this is instead a book on lifesteading as Rory learns to cultivate faith, love, and fatherhood on a small farm while doing everything, at times, but farming. With frequent stories of his and Joey’s years together, and how those guide his life today, Rory unpacks just what it means to be open to new experiences. “This isn’t a how-to book; it’s more of a how we, or more accurately, how He, God, planted us on a few acres of land and grew something bigger than Joey or I could have ever imagined.”

A Little Life

A Little Life
Author: Hanya Yanagihara
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 833
Release: 2016-01-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0804172706

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. Look for Hanya Yanagihara’s latest bestselling novel, To Paradise.

This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm

This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm
Author: Ted Genoways
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2017-09-19
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0393292584

Winner of the Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize 2019 selection for the One Book One Nebraska and All Iowa state reading programs "Genoways gives the reader a kitchen-table view of the vagaries, complexities, and frustrations of modern farming…Insightful and empathetic." —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel The family farm lies at the heart of our national identity, and yet its future is in peril. Rick Hammond grew up on a farm, and for forty years he has raised cattle and crops on his wife’s fifth-generation homestead in Nebraska, in hopes of passing it on to their four children. But as the handoff nears, their family farm—and their entire way of life—are under siege on many fronts, from shifting trade policies, to encroaching pipelines, to climate change. Following the Hammonds from harvest to harvest, Ted Genoways explores the rapidly changing world of small, traditional farming operations. He creates a vivid, nuanced portrait of a radical new landscape and one family’s fight to preserve their legacy and the life they love.

Famous Long Ago

Famous Long Ago
Author: Raymond Mungo
Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781558499478

"First edition published 1970 by Beacon Press."

My Generation

My Generation
Author: John Downton Hazlett
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 1998
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780299157845

John Hazlett's engaging study of writers from the 1960s demonstrates the ways in which the idea of the generation has affected autobiographical writing in this century. Autobiographers from the sixties claim to speak on behalf of all members of their generation. However, each writer presents a unique political and personal agenda.

Daffodil Hill

Daffodil Hill
Author: Jake Keiser
Publisher: Dial Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2022-06-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1984854836

A candid and heartwarming memoir of reinvention about a city girl who trades her career and her heels for five acres and a herd of goats “Jake Keiser is my favorite kind of woman—gutsy, tenacious, and not afraid to be vulnerable. And the animals are pretty f*cking adorable, too.”—Tara Schuster, author of Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies Jake Keiser was living the life in Tampa, Florida, running a high-powered PR firm and juggling drink dates, shopping sprees, and charity galas. But at age thirty-eight, following a failed marriage, a series of miscarriages, and a still-blistering breakup, she began to suffer from extreme anxiety. Hit with the realization that no amount of Botox could fill the hole in her heart, she decided to make the impulse purchase of a lifetime and bought a farm in the middle of nowhere, Mississippi. Suddenly responsible for more than seventy-five animals and five acres of land, and with only one bar of cell service, Jake begins her search for inner peace. She learns to fix a well, haul wood, shoot a gun, and care for baby chicks, goats, turkeys, geese, dogs, and a cat, playing spa music for them when they’re sick and naming them after her favorite fashion designers. The only problem is that she still can’t figure out how to truly care for herself. Unable to escape the accumulated pain of her past, Jake hits rock bottom. With nowhere left to run, she’s finally forced to confront a bracing reality: The farm won’t save her. Only she can save herself. Poignant, hilarious, and utterly charming, Daffodil Hill is for anyone who feels stuck—for those of us strapped to our desks and dreaming of an unconventional life, for those of us searching for something more. Most of all, it is for people who believe that the greatest love story of all is the one we write with ourselves.

Farming for Us All

Farming for Us All
Author: Michael Mayerfeld Bell
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2010-11-01
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 9780271046327

Farming for Us All gives us the opportunity to explore the possibilities for social, environmental, and economic change that practical, dialogic agriculture presents.