Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm [Hardcover]

Jane Brox (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 26, 2004

Though few of us now live close to the soil, the world we inhabit has been sculpted by our long national saga of settlement. At the heart of our identity lies the notion of the family farm, as shaped by European history and reshaped by the vast opportunities of the continent. It lies at the heart of Jane Brox's personal story, too: she is the daughter of immigrant New England farmers whose way of life she memorialized in her first two books but has not carried on.

In this clear-eyed, lyrical account, Brox twines the two narratives, personal and historical, to explore the place of the family farm as it has evolved from the pilgrims' brutal progress at Plymouth to the modern world, where much of our food is produced by industrial agriculture while the small farm is both marginalized and romanticized. In considering the place of the farm, Brox also considers the rise of textile cities in America, which encroached not only upon farms and farmers but upon the sense of commonality that once sustained them; and she traces the transformation of the idea of wilderness--and its intricate connection to cultivation--which changed as our ties to the land loosened, as terror of the wild was replaced by desire for it. Exploring these strands with neither judgment nor sentimentality, Brox arrives at something beyond a biography of the farm: a vivid depiction of the half-life it carries on in our collective imagination.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Brox (Five Thousand Days Like This One) considers the farm's practical and symbolic roles in both American consciousness and her own family in this poetic rumination. "In America," she writes, "not only do individual dreams have their origins in farming, the notion of the Republic is stowed there as well." Telling the "larger story of cultivation," Brox gracefully moves between personal recollection and historical narrative. Her paternal grandparents—immigrants from Lebanon—acquired a small farm in the coastal hills north of Boston in 1901; it offered an escape from tenement living but isolated them from fellow Middle Eastern immigrants. Turning outward, Brox considers how, in earlier eras, the character of farms reconfigured the American landscape. The Pilgrims' fenced-in farms contrasted sharply with the open spaces in which Native Americans grew their crops; later, the need for building material in the burgeoning textile cities saw the coastal Northeast farmed for granite via deep stone quarries. And these days, she writes, the size of a farm can mean the difference between prosperity and failure, even as property taxes make land prohibitively expensive. Brox candidly reveals arguments between her father and brother over how to save their farm, as well as her own struggles to carve out a place for herself on it. The story has been written elsewhere, but Brox tells it with a clear, impassioned simplicity.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Brox has been telling the story of her family's Massachusetts farm in thoughtful and elegant memoirs (Here and Nowhere Else, 1995, and Five Thousand Days like This One, 1999). In her third observant and meticulously researched rumination, she continues to chart the fortune of family and farm, albeit from within a fresh and incisive history of cultivation in America, beginning with the contrast between Native American agriculture and the expectations of white settlers, and extending to Thomas Jefferson's agrarian vision, the cultivation of the West, and the replacement of New England agriculture with industry as textile mills shadowed once pristine rivers. Brox's look back is compelling by virtue of her radiant prose; her intimacy with the land (her history of Nantucket is especially haunting); and her judicious use of obscure, historical first-person accounts. And she muses on the present with just the right mix of wonder and irony as she marvels over the topsy-turvy fact that for a small family farm to survive today, it has to be run as an "agrotourist destination." Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: North Point Press; 1 edition (August 26, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865476497
• ISBN-13: 978-0865476493
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,103,744 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

JANE BROX is the author of Clearing Land, Five Thousand Days Like This One, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Here and Nowhere Else, which received the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award. She lives in Maine.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An emotional and at times spiritual remembrance, December 9, 2004

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm (Hardcover)

Clearing Land: Legacies Of The American Farm combines memoir and history, drawing upon the author's own experience growing up on a family farm with the economic realities that are forcing such farms to extinction in the modern day. Poetic in its reminiscence of a daily life deeply intertwined with nature, cultivating plants and animals, and the joy of simply being alive, Clearing Land is a powerful firsthand testimony sure to evoke memories both pleasant and questionable of those who also lived and worked in agriculture. An emotional and at times spiritual remembrance.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful book, September 1, 2009

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NU74 "continually amazed" (Pittsfield, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm (Hardcover)

This book was recommended reading by more than one source in the local food literature and websites. I'm glad I bought it. The book contains such beautiful and moving writing that I read paragraphs out loud to my wife. The author's use of quotations is flawless and really helps convey the emotional undercurrents of the book.
I am also a New Englander, also grew up on an old farm and have spent time in literally all the places the author writes about. The old farm is gone, as is the old unpopulated moorland on Nantucket. I cannot go to either place anymore. Luckily, I found another place to settle in far western Massachusetts. It hasn't changed much at all in a generation.
Jane Brox is a kindred spirit.

5.0 out of 5 stars Book was in excellent condition, August 23, 2010

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T. Pagnozzi (New England, USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm (Hardcover)

This book came in excellent condition and in the time specified. Need for high school summer read. Reading for a h.s. student is a little difficult, but this was directed by the school.