Journalist Richard Rhodes spent a year with a corn farming family in Missouri. What comes out of that experience is an account of farm life both technical and personal.
The book is now about twenty years old, but still holds up pretty well. Rhodes avoids the pitfall of overwrought romaticising of farming and the clueless citified gee whizzery that can occur when an urban writer tackles rural material. At the same time, the book is often evocative and emotional, so that it doesn't read like a dry textbook account of what farming life is like. And Rhodes manages to be reasonably balanced, his pseudonized subjects treated as real human beings, neither perfect not terrible.
You may have to hunt for this one, but it's worth a look.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Taking on the Trust
Steve Weinberg's goal is to tie together the stories of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller; the pioneer journalist and pioneer industrialist usually make appearances in each others' stories, but Weinberg's stated intention is to devote the book to "their epic collision course."
Weinberg's area of expertise is journalism, and so the focus here is ultimately on Tarbell. The last paragraph of the introduction clarifies his intention "But believing in Truth as a means to change the world, Tarbell invented journalistic techniques to accomplish her goals. The saga of how she reached that point and of how John D. Rockefeller and the Standard oil Company ended up in her path is about to begin."
So Tarbell takes the lion's share of the attention here. That's not a bad thing; Tarbell has never been extensively or deeply covered, and Ron Chernow's Titan doesn't leave much to be said about Rockefeller (Weinberg quotes from it frequently).
By weaving there stories together, particularly in the early days before they each achieved the success that would make them famous, we get an interesting picture of two people caught up in the same larger tides of their day. And Weinberg sets an excellent pace. This would be an easy structure to flub. Too much time in either individual's life and we lose sight of the larger picture; too little, and the work becomes too superficial to be useful. There are some times, later in the book, where this becomes mainly Tarbell's story, but for the most part, Weinberg has controlled his material well.
Informative and a useful study of the very collision that he sets out to chronicle. The hardcover version has gone out of print, but the paperback should be along shortly. Definitely worth a read.
Weinberg's area of expertise is journalism, and so the focus here is ultimately on Tarbell. The last paragraph of the introduction clarifies his intention "But believing in Truth as a means to change the world, Tarbell invented journalistic techniques to accomplish her goals. The saga of how she reached that point and of how John D. Rockefeller and the Standard oil Company ended up in her path is about to begin."
So Tarbell takes the lion's share of the attention here. That's not a bad thing; Tarbell has never been extensively or deeply covered, and Ron Chernow's Titan doesn't leave much to be said about Rockefeller (Weinberg quotes from it frequently).
By weaving there stories together, particularly in the early days before they each achieved the success that would make them famous, we get an interesting picture of two people caught up in the same larger tides of their day. And Weinberg sets an excellent pace. This would be an easy structure to flub. Too much time in either individual's life and we lose sight of the larger picture; too little, and the work becomes too superficial to be useful. There are some times, later in the book, where this becomes mainly Tarbell's story, but for the most part, Weinberg has controlled his material well.
Informative and a useful study of the very collision that he sets out to chronicle. The hardcover version has gone out of print, but the paperback should be along shortly. Definitely worth a read.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
The Thoreau You Don't Know
Robert Sullivan's previous best-seller was Rats, so he has taken a definite step up in subject matter.
Here he provides us with the 1,423rd re-consideration of Thoreau. You would think that the world doesn't need to take one more walk around this American monument, but Sullivan's book is a worthy treatment of the American icon, and Sullivan achieves that by treating Thoreau not as an icon but as, well, a guy. Who did some stuff and wrote some things.
Those who write about Thoreau tend to fall into one of three camps. 1) He was a pure, unadulterated genius, forsaking ordinary life for deep communion with nature. 2) He's an overhyped sham. 3) Wasn't he that guy who lived in the cabin?
Sullivan steps over all three of these boxes and treats Thoreau as if he'd just discovered him for the first time. He is occasionally ingenuous, being surprised by facts that even casual Thoreau scholars already knew. But he humanizes Thoreau, treating him as neither genius or con job. He puts many of Thoreau's achievements in perspective and in context, so that even things we knew about Thoreau make a bit more sense.
Sullivan is ultimately most interested in Thoreau the environmentalist, but he pays attention to the writer, the worker, the citizen, and most of all, the man. In bringing Thoreau down to human scale, Sullivan makes him both more impressive and more accessible. There are no shocking new revelations about Thoreau here, but in a breezily-written slim volume, Sullivan lets us see Thoreau's accomplishments as part of the bigger picture of his life, while also connecting it all to the modern world as well.
Not the shocking new view of Thoreau that some PR suggests, but a solid, readable book about an important American voice. Well worth the read.
Here he provides us with the 1,423rd re-consideration of Thoreau. You would think that the world doesn't need to take one more walk around this American monument, but Sullivan's book is a worthy treatment of the American icon, and Sullivan achieves that by treating Thoreau not as an icon but as, well, a guy. Who did some stuff and wrote some things.
Those who write about Thoreau tend to fall into one of three camps. 1) He was a pure, unadulterated genius, forsaking ordinary life for deep communion with nature. 2) He's an overhyped sham. 3) Wasn't he that guy who lived in the cabin?
Sullivan steps over all three of these boxes and treats Thoreau as if he'd just discovered him for the first time. He is occasionally ingenuous, being surprised by facts that even casual Thoreau scholars already knew. But he humanizes Thoreau, treating him as neither genius or con job. He puts many of Thoreau's achievements in perspective and in context, so that even things we knew about Thoreau make a bit more sense.
Sullivan is ultimately most interested in Thoreau the environmentalist, but he pays attention to the writer, the worker, the citizen, and most of all, the man. In bringing Thoreau down to human scale, Sullivan makes him both more impressive and more accessible. There are no shocking new revelations about Thoreau here, but in a breezily-written slim volume, Sullivan lets us see Thoreau's accomplishments as part of the bigger picture of his life, while also connecting it all to the modern world as well.
Not the shocking new view of Thoreau that some PR suggests, but a solid, readable book about an important American voice. Well worth the read.
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