Clabbered Dirt, Sweet Grass [Paperback]

Gary Paulsen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 30, 1994

Paulsen captures a vanishing way of life and offers a lyrical tribute to the american farm. “Paulsen’s prose is realistic and down-to-earth....Ruth Wright Paulsen’s paintings are an invitation to pause and imagine...a delight” (Christian Science Monitor). Illustrations by Ruth Wright Paulsen.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Gary Paulsen, author of adventure novels for young people, shows us a world of unremitting hard work and self-sufficiency in his powerfully elegiac account of the seasonal activities of a multigenerational farming family of Scandinavian descent on the northern Great Plains some 70 years ago. This is not exactly Lake Wobegon, but akin to it. Uncertainties and rewards provide a theme. Spring represents a time of birth for animal stock. Summer means plowing, collecting wild fruit and canning garden produce on wood stoves. Fall brings the harvest and its chores--killing animals for meat--while winter, nominally a period for the farm to rest, entails gathering firewood and logging timber (a cash crop). Everybody worked, even when they relaxed at the end of the day--women quilted or crocheted, and men sharpened tools as they spun tales. Any reader with a rural background will be transported by Paulsen to the past. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This is a quintessential farm story filled with images of rich soil, warm sun, strong crops, sleek animals, and the ongoing cycle of labor from plowing to harvest. The people in Paulsen's tale are incidental to the work. Up before the sun, a family of work-roughened hands are always cooking and laying table, milking and harnessing horses, repairing machinery and delicately quilting. The reader is drawn in by the words and by the paintings of Paulsen's wife, Ruth Wright Paulsen, until they too feel the sweat and the strain of muscles, the heat of summer canning, the joy of a summer picnic, the ongoing rush to have enough food and just a little money to live another year on the farm. Where Richard Rhodes's Farm ( LJ 1/90) nails down the reality of agricultural life, Paulsen's Clabbered Dirt, Sweet Grass lets the reader dream of simpler, kinder times. This book is very well written and illustrated and will appeal to a general audience as well as one with a specific interest in farming or agriculture. Highly recommended.
- Debra Schneider, Virginia Henderson Internat. Nursing Lib., Indianapolis
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 140 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (March 30, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156000520
• ISBN-13: 978-0156000529
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #217,568 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This *Is* the Way It Was., November 28, 2000

By 

Howard Parkhurst (Boycevile, Wisconsin) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Clabbered Dirt, Sweet Grass (Paperback)

I grew up on a small family farm in rural Michigan, the type of farm that was vanishing even as I grew up on it. Since I grew up in the 1950's, many of the episodes and scenarios depicted in Gary Paulsen's Clabbered Dirt, Sweet Grass pre-date my youth, but enough do not that I can assure you that Paulsen has captured the sights, the sounds, the tastes, the smells and even the textures of the events he pictures in words. New calves, for example do not know how to drink from a bucket and must be taught, because the purpose of having a dairy cow is the sale of her milk, and if the calf is allowed to suck, it will as Paulsen says "ruin the cow for milking," while the calf cannot possibly consume all of the milk the cow produces. "So when the cows were milked a small amount was poured into a bucket and the children had to teach them how to drink. They would suck on anything, the ends of our coats, mittens, ears, and we would stick our fingers in their mouths and start them sucking and lower our hands into the warm milk in the bucket so they would suck the milk up through our fingers. It took them only a short time to learn to suck the milk directly, slamming their heads into the buckets as they would slam them into the cow to make the milk flow so that milk splashed up and out and into our faces, down our clothes, hot new milk, spring milk." Or as he says of milking, "the hands work in a rhythm as old as all rhythms, the rhythm that is the giving of milk, so that the person becomes the calf and the cow the mother and the milk hisses and sputters into the white foam." For those who have never known farm life, Gary Paulsen's poetic prose will provide a vivid and accurate picture of life as it used to be on the family farm. For those who, like my 80-year-old father, knew the family farm of the 1920's-1950's, this book will evoke rich memories. For those of us who knew farm life afterward, the memories will be selective. But they're there. They're there.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A lyrical work that captures four seasons of farm living., September 29, 1998

By 

David Roberts (Kansas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Clabbered Dirt, Sweet Grass (Hardcover)

Clabbered Earth, Sweet Grass is a lyrically written nonfiction work that describes four seasons of living on a farm. This is the farm that housed three and more generations under one roof; the self-sufficient farm of the turn of the century. Hard work and little money, but strong family ties, and a closeness to the earth that quite literally is life and death- that is the farm Gary Paulsen is writing about.

I enjoyed Gary Paulsen's style; both the lyrical style and the look back to what "farm" once meant. There is both the sweet grass and harsh fact in this work. I think I have a better feel for the farms that were fading away in the country when I grew up in rural Virginia. If I do, it comes from reading this book. It is a great read.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is one of my absolute favorite books., March 21, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Clabbered Dirt, Sweet Grass (Hardcover)

I love Gary Paulsen's prose/poetry. I recommend reading it outloud in order to hear (and almost smell) the sites and sounds of the farm. Give it to a "city kid" or one from the farm. It is a wonderful gift. cf