Harvest
An Adventure into the Heart of America's Family Farms
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
“Richard Horan has brought us a welcome view of America to defy the prevailing political and financial nastiness. This is a timely and important book.”
—Ted Morgan, author of Wilderness at Dawn
“A lively visit with the dauntless men and women who operate America’s family farms and help provide our miraculous annual bounty. Richard Horan writes with energy and passion.”
—Hannah Nordhaus, author of The Beekeeper’s Lament
“Horan’s new book evocatively describes the peril and promise of family farms in America. I loved joining him on this journey, and so will you.”
—T.A. Barron, author of The Great Tree of Avalon
In Seeds, novelist and nature writer Richard Horan sought out the trees that inspired the work of great American writers like Faulkner, Kerouac, Welty, Wharton, and Harper Lee. In Harvest, Horan embarks upon a serendipitous journey across America to work the harvests of more than a dozen essential or unusual food crops—and, in the process, forms powerful connections with the farmers, the soil, and the seasons.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Horan (Seeds) offers an engaging, albeit didactic look at agriculture in America through the microcosm of harvest season at several small family farms. While his eye for the bucolic frequently recalls a nostalgic past and disdains the present, Horan un-self-consciously peppers his sharp observations with jarring platitudes that remove the reader from the task at hand. His paternalistic liberalism paints immigrant field workers as "ignorant, poor, yet so ripe with hope and determination and humility" and blinds him to the dangerous similarity between his plan for prisoner rehabilitation and this country's agricultural, slave-holding past. This same lack of self-awareness crescendos in the harvest of wild rice, when Horan goes so far as to tell the tale in a Disneyesque caricature of native storytelling a confusing choice. Poor narrative strategies undermine Horan's otherwise excellent observations of the vigor of farm work and the characters he meets as he journeys from farm to farm, learning what is left of America's small agricultural enterprises and the difficulties they face. The harvest of wheat, green beans, blueberries, tomatoes, red raspberries, wild rice, cranberries, potatoes, and walnuts will carry the reader into daydreams of hearty, satisfying work, even as the guide sometimes proves problematic.
