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Publication
Description
David Mas Masumoto, best-selling author of Epitaph for a Peach, returns to the same ground but digs even deeper in a new, "more ambitious book" in which "he lets his philosophy about man and nature emerge from an absorbing chronicle of his life and that of his Japanese antecedents" (The Economist). This is a book about working alongside the ghosts of generations past, about the search for roots in the tragic history of internment camps and in the rural culture of Japan. It is equally about renewal-reinvigorating the farm with organic techniques, teaching his children how to carry on the work that eighty acres of peaches and grapes demand. Masumoto knits past and present to achieve a rare and essential harmony: holding on to what matters, despite the pressures of time and change. "Take your time, linger" with the book, counsels the San Diego Union-Tribune, "Masumoto's serene tales . . . are like a balm." He is a "remarkable" author, sums up The Atlantic, "with a field, and a sensibility, peculiarly his own."… (more)
User reviews
As a young man he went to college and then to Japan, where he took an intensive language course and then lived with his great uncle for some time, helping him with his farm of rice and buckwheat. Upon returning home he decided he wanted to farm, and that he was interested in organic methods. When he wrote this book, he was raising his own two kids on his farm, with his father still there to help.
This book is over 20 years old now, and I wonder what his own kids are now doing. Is either interested in continuing the tradition?