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"In the vastness of the Upper Midwest, the fields and farms can inevitably begin to look the same. Yet each enterprise is like a small country, with its own particular history and culture. By chronicling a single family's tenure on the land, John Hildebrand here gives us an extraordinary survey, at once panoramic and intimate, of one family's farm over more than a century - and a moving account of a vanishing way of life." "The family is Hildebrand's wife Sharon's, and the farm is 240 acres of pristine cropland near Rochester, Minnesota. O'Neills have farmed this place since 1880, when their Irish immigrant ancestors headed west; but now, after four generations, the future is uncertain. Still, the family farm remains one version of the original American dream, and this book recounts a singular clan's struggle to keep that dream alive." "This is the story of good times and hardships and revolutionary changes; of livestock auctions and county fairs; of weddings, funerals, and the rituals of country life by which half of all Americans used to live, and a dwindling few still do. We follow the seasonal cycle of chores as crops are planted, weather is watched, cows are bred, and unpredictable events interrupt the everyday routine. And we see how the O'Neills have made this place their home, how as a nation we've changed, what we've learned, what we've lost."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved… (more)
User reviews
The narrative is filled with memorable vignettes but suffers from an overall murkiness of purpose. The title, for example, doesn't really capture what is going on here. Hildebrand wants to provide an alternative to the typical ways in which land is mapped (aerial surveys, land-use maps, etc.) by making us see the people on the land and the texture of the land itself. As he notes at one point, most of us see farmland only as we blast past it on a freeway, and "The anonymity of farmland is what makes it so easily converted to other purposes" (chiefly strip malls and butt-ugly housing developments. But the story here is scattered, the various members of the family sometimes hard to keep straight (a basic family tree would have been an enormous help), and the overall intent of this project isn't clear. It isn't really a re-mapping in even a metaphorical sense. He seems to want to avoid an elegiac tone, and yet that is probably the best characterization of the book. Maps are fundamentally tools designed to help us do something but it isn't clear what either Hildebrand or we are supposed to do with this remapped map.