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Cargando... Clabbered Dirt, Sweet Grasspor Gary Paulsen
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. I am a huge fan of Gary Paulsen. When I saw this at a used book sale, I thought, wow, where’d this come from? I would not classify it as young adult. This book is a wonderful, long poem. An ode to farm life—I could see my Grandfather and Grandmother who raised my mom on a dairy farm in south western Minnesota clearly in this book. So much about it resonated with stories from them and my mother. A way of life, a way of living, done in by the industrialization of food. This book paints a vivid picture of life on a farm, back around the turn of the century. Aunts, uncles and grandparents lived with the family. Most of the crops and animals raised on the farm were for their own sustenance; old clothes were sewn into warm quilts, many things were mended and made by hand. The little money needed for school supplies, flour and salt was hard-earned cutting cordwood or picking potatoes on other farms. People worked very long, hard hours and all the families came together once a year to help harvest grain, the team moving around from farm to farm until everyone's crop was in. Close association with the animals, upon whose lives they depended. The great workhorses. The pigs and cattle- living breathing animals for so long fed and cherished, then transformed into meat for the table. The horror of accidents from men caught in farming machinery, small children wandering into danger (one toddler gets eaten by a hog), people lost in the snow simply trying to walk from one building to another. But they don't strike home too much because none of them are known personally- only stories told of other's misfortune. Through the whole book there aren't any real characters that you follow or come to know, overall it's just a portrait of a way of life. A simple book that you can read in one day (I managed it, and you know how little reading time I have nowadays!) yet its images stay with you. I keep thinking now of how dependent the farmers were upon the weather, how precise their timing had to be in order to get things planted, harvested, etc at the right moment so things wouldn't fail to grow or spoil or be lost in some way. It was a difficult, back-breaking way of life, and yet it had its own sweet rewards. The cold swimming hole. The warmth of a cow's flank during milking. The fabulous meals cooked up for harvest teams by wives and daughters. The beautiful warm heaps of quilts stitched with memories that children piled under in shivering attics.... Paulson writes (hate to use this word, but here goes!) lyrically -- almost poetically about the rhythm of life on a turn of the century farm. A time when horse-pulled farm equipment began to give way to horsepowered farm equipment. Work rules; the type of work governed by the seasons, from which no hands are exempt from the smallest to the oldest in the continuous effort to make sure there is enough food, because there surely is no money. The foreword almost put me off with its central feature a large dead horse, but there is a reverence to Paulson's writing about the circle of life that pulled me on. This is a book to sit with and enjoy, to read and be grateful while reading that better machinery makes life a bit easier for the hands and backs that struggle to fill our nation's plates -- but the passages about luck, about fate, about the horrible accidents that can befall the careless or inattentive on a farm... those still ring as true, pure, and gruesomely cautionary as ever. Ruth Paulson's accompanying illustrations are a lovely series on their own, and compliment the text beautifully. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
Story of the relationship between the farmer and his animals in a vanishing way of life. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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Gary Paulsen writes about the hard work that never ends in such poetic language, it almost makes one long to live this quickly disappearing way of life. This is a nostalgic book complete with some lovely full-page paintings by the author’s wife of simple things found around the farm: chickens, children skinny-dipping in the local water hole, a rustic barn, and the corn shocks in the snow which can be seen in detail on the book cover. This book can be read in an afternoon and provided me with a trip down memory lane to good times spent as a child on the farm in Michigan owned by a relative and to the farm in Southwest Missouri where my husband grew up. Seeing how people used to make a living from the land through the harshness of the different seasons gives me a new appreciation for the men and women who settled our country by the strength of their backs and the hopes of better lives. ( )