Farm (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

A city dweller is likely to come away from this book with the impression that farming is nothing but hard work yet with a sense that he has lost something precious and irretrievable. He can understand why Richard Rhodes’s protagonists should cling so tenaciously to the soil in spite of the low net income it yields for the endless hours they spend with their plants and animals. Sharing the work as well as the hopes, fears, and disappointments of running a farm has given Tom and Sally Bauer a strongly bonded marital relationship of the kind that seems to be disappearing in urban America. Although they never run out of chores, they never have time to feel bored or alienated.

The most striking feature of this well-written book is its author’s ability to communicate strong emotions without lapsing into sentimentality or romanticism. Rhodes has a keen and unflinching eye for the truth, warts and all--a characteristic of some of the best American nonfiction now being written. Instead of glossing over the sordid and brutal aspects of running a big farm, he takes the reader right into the pigpens and cattle trucks and gives him a bracing whiff of the aroma. In one chapter he describes in excruciating detail how bull calves are castrated and quotes the crude banter the men exchange to cover up their pity and guilt.

Rhodes, who won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1988 for his massive historical narrative THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB, was born in Kansas City, Kansas, and spent six years of his early life working on a Missouri farm. He has the experience and writing skill to make a purely factual, relatively uneventful chronicle into an interesting and edifying reading experience.

Sources for Further Study

Insight. V, October 30, 1989, p.63.

Library Journal. CXIV, October 1, 1989, p.110.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. October 8, 1989, p.3.

The New York Times. September 21, 1989, p. B2(N).

The New York Times Book Review. XCIV, September 24, 1989, p.1.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXVI, August 25, 1989, p.52.

Time. CXXXIV, September 25, 1989, p.81.