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Title: The Land Was Everything: Letters from an American Farmer by Victor Davis Hanson ISBN: 0-684-84501-6 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 20 April, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (6 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Hardhitting, true, and very sad
Comment: Agrarianism goes down to a hard and dusty death. The realities of growing commodities as a family in California are tough. Hanson does know what he's talking about, contra reader S.M. Stirling, below (I wonder if this fellow even read the book, his comments are so off, not to mention being practically a personal attack on Hanson); he lives the reality of this difficult life while also being a classical scholar. He seems uniquely qualified to illuminate the Greek and Latin roots of agrarianism as the foundation of democracy, and with a lifelong interest in the classics, I found this very interesting; I learned a lot. I highly recommend this book, which I found compelling...
Rating: 5
Summary: Fertile Food for Thought for The Thinking Human
Comment: This is one of those few books that I enjoyed and thought about so much that I bought six copies from Amazon to hand out to friends who I believed would also appreciate Hanson's efforts. It really is that exceptional! The thing most notable about "The Land Is Everything" is how much response it will provoke out of you if are a "thinking type". That doesn't mean you will love or hate it all...you will, however, THINK! Despite the definite order the book is arranged in, you will get a sense that much of it was almost written in streams of thought. Hanson seems to meander on tangents at times and in other places even rants but, this stream is still flowing briskly! He focusses in on "Man versus Nature", "Man versus Man", and "Man versus Self" in the realm of small-scale farming.
Hanson is uniquely qualified to write about the subject of farming and it's effects on character. He is a fifth generation grape farmer in California while also a Professor of Classics at CSU Fresno. The clincher is that he can convey his beliefs to paper with a VENGEANCE! The crux of this book is showing how the decline of self-reliant family farms in America is sapping the core character of what an "American" was in our first 200 years. He passionately describes the life, both good and bad, of the American farmer and gives numerous examples of issues that influence his/her character and culture. The fact that America, up until fairly recently, was predominantly a land of farmers is elaborated on at length. Hanson admires and respects the ways the brutal realities of farming the land force farmers to stay literally rooted in hard work, ethics, and honesty even if it sometimes makes them crazy! He then launches into his assessments of the effects on the gradual loss of this culture on the United States today as it becomes more and more "urban" and "cosmopolitan".
One thing I can almost promise: you WILL have an opinion on this book once you've read it. There will be points that you will agree or disagree with strongly and many others that will fall somewhere in between. The bottom line is that you will definitely feel better for having read it.
Finally, if you have found yourself drawn to understand the heroism and motivation of the New York City fireman who fought and died at the World Trade Center attack on 9/11, I doubly recommend this book.
Rating: 4
Summary: Enemies of Agriculture
Comment: Victor Davis Hanson is a rarity among classical scholars: he writes with elegance and conviction not only about classics (I admired Who Killed Homer?, which he wrote with John Heath), but about the decline of independent farming in America. A fifth-generation California grape farmer, he has written previously in Fields Without Dreams about his struggles to retain the family farm. (He wrote so passionately, in fact, that I used to read quotes aloud to my husband after dinner, alternately enthralled by brilliant insights and disturbed by weird tangents into political conservativism). A classicist myself, I am startled and impressed by his ability to relate the experiences of farmers in America to ancient Greek agriculture. Though I still read Latin on weekends with my husband, I have known very few classicists who can write compellingly about anything outside their narrow field of knowledge This new collection of essays, The Land Was Everything, is more palatable to the common reader than Fields Without Dreams: he educates the general public about the social and economic whys and wherefores of independent farming in the twenty-first century. His book pays homage to J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, a Frenchman who wrote Letters from an American Farmer in 1782, and explores American farmers' options, describing their war on pests and weeds,the history of chemical poisons and pesticides, the impact of suburban sprawl, weather, trespassers, and other enemies of agriculture. I'm a fan of this gallant classicist-farmer curmudgeon, though I don't agree with all he says.
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Title: FIELDS WITHOUT DREAMS : DEFENDING THE AGRARAIN IDEAL by Victor Davis Hanson ISBN: 0684835703 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 25 March, 1997 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Mexifornia: A State of Becoming by Victor Davis Hanson ISBN: 1893554732 Publisher: Encounter Books Pub. Date: June, 2003 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization by Victor Davis Hanson ISBN: 0520209354 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: January, 2000 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: An Autumn of War : What America Learned from September 11 and the War on Terrorism by Victor Hanson ISBN: 1400031133 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 13 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Ripples of Battle : How Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think by VICTOR HANSON ISBN: 0385504004 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 16 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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