Postcards are the only communication between Loyal Blood and the poor, hardworking farm family he leaves behind in Vermont. The secret Loyal carries with him--the accidental killing of his girlfriend, Billy--is revealed in the first pages, and thereafter, as he prospects for uranium, traps coyotes, or digs for dinosaur bones, his messages continue to arrive home from across the U.S., long after his father has died and his brother, sister, and mother...

"The Unsettling of America" is Wendell Berry's personal, dramatic inquiry into the way in which we use the land that sustains us. For the roots of our attitudes toward farming, Berry goes back to the industrial revolution, which promised freedom from physical toil, and to the "conquistador" mentality that ruled the settlement of North America, treating land, resources, and ultimately people as infinitely expendable. Out of this history comes a disturbing,...

"There's no such thing as rural America. Or, rather, as Steven Conn argues, "rural America" is a phrase that has been made to mean so many things that it doesn't mean anything. In fact, he maintains, rural America--so often characterized as in crisis or in danger of being left behind--has been shaped by the same major forces as the rest of the country since at least the end of the Civil War: militarization, industrialization, corporatization, and...

In a critically acclaimed memoir, a correspondent for The New York Times recounts growing up in the Alabama hill country, the son of a violent veteran and a mother who tried to insulate her children from the poverty and ignorance of life. This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills...

Overview: William Kamkwamba was born in Malawi, a country where magic ruled and modern science was mystery. It was also a land withered by drought and hunger. But William had read about windmills, and he dreamed of building one that would bring to his small village a set of luxuries that only 2 percent of Malawians could enjoy: electricity and running water. His neighbors called him misala-crazy-but William refused to let go of his dreams. With a...

Using the Tennessee antievolution 'Monkey Law,' authored by a local legislator, as a measure of how conservatives successfully resisted, co-opted, or ignored reform efforts, Jeanette Keith explores conflicts over the meaning and cost of progress in Tennessee's hill country from 1890 to 1925. Until the 1890s, the Upper Cumberland was dominated by small farmers who favored limited government and firm local control of churches and schools. Farm men...

The insensitivity between neighbors leads to the gradual disintegration of a small California farm community.

Inheriting her father's 7,000 acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, the author accompanies a group of evangelical Christian wheat harvesters through the heartland, peeling back layers of the American story, the politics of food and the culture of the Great Plains. For over one hundred years, the Mockett family has owned a seven-thousand-acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett's father was raised. Mockett,...

In rural Gaotai County, two lonely, middle-aged outcasts are pushed into an arranged marriage by their families. Ma is a humble farmer with little to offer his timid and sickly wife, Cao, except for a small, abandoned house on a barren patch of land. From just a few seeds, their newly planted crops take root and flourish; similarly, an unexpected bond between them starts to blossom. As seasons pass, their dedication to each other grows stronger, but...

Follows the lives of the residents of a small town in Canada.