Forty Acres and a Goat: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Will D. Campbell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1986

Describing himself as a “steeple dropout” and a “bootleg preacher” who also works as a “freelance civil rights activist,” Will D. Campbell has earned a notable place among America's favorite storytellers. Detailing his harrowing exploits during the racially charged 1960s as a liberal white man of God, this memoir brilliantly describes Campbell's attempt to live a spiritual life in a time of mistrust, racial intolerance, and violence. Despite such a dire backdrop, Campbell serves as a guide through the events with his patented humor and poignancy. In one instance he notes that black Muslims protected the grand dragon of the KKK in an upstate New York prison, demonstrating the contradictions and strange circumstances that bring people together.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Author of Brother to a Dragonfly, Campbell recounts in this free-flowing, allusive memoir a quarter-century of activism as a committed Christian and "preacher without a church." Emerging from his Tennessee farm, this Southern Baptist became a prominent figure in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. His recollections are enlivened by expressive language, a blend of allegory and humor, made colorful by anecdotes about important people he engaged in earthy, often confrontational dialogue, and then befriended. While the social revolutionary aspect of Campbell's humanitarian mission is featured, it is undergirded by his depiction of his warm family life, his closeness to the land and to a menagerie headed by a knowing goat, which make his Tennessee homestead a place of retreat, both physical and spiritual, for his many visitors.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This is a funny, touching, beautifully written sequel to Campbell's autobiography, Brother to a Dragonfly. A Baptist preacher, farmer, and civil rights activist, Campbell has combined parable, allegory, and personal recollection to create a fascinating account of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Using animals as symbols and a composite black co-worker named T.J. Eaves as a sounding board, he charts the uncertain course of social change in the South during this turbulent period. One grows to admire Campbell and his pet goat, Jackson, enormously. Although not as focused as his previous memoir, this is wonderful to read. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries. Anthony O. Edmonds, History Dept., Ball State Univ., Muncie, Ind.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 281 pages
• Publisher: Peachtree Pub Ltd (October 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0931948975
• ISBN-13: 978-0931948978
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,076,407 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars spread the word, May 25, 2002

By 

jon david fain (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Forty Acres and a Goat: A Memoir (Paperback)

I've owned this book for fourteen years...a real treasure. Have told many friends about it...this was done first by a Southern publisher; then in paperback, I think, by HarperCollins.

Now, it looks like a new Southern publisher is bringing it back out in paperback. It's funky, Southern, religious, racial...abosolutely Southern and a must read. I recommend it to anyone who asks big questions about themselves and world and people around them.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars New Release Worth Buying, May 22, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Forty Acres and a Goat: A Memoir (Paperback)

Will Campbell is one of the South's great writers and this re-issue of Forty Acres and A Goat is perhaps his best. This book, still in high demand, has an exciting new cover and should be read by all who love the South, goats and God.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars christian maverick's memoir, January 17, 2007

By 

Daniel B. Clendenin (www.journeywithjesus.net) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Forty Acres and a Goat: A Memoir (Paperback)

When he was seven years old Will Campbell (b. 1924) decided that he would be a preacher. Ten years later he was ordained, then took a pastorate at a small church in Louisiana. "It just didn't work out," he writes. Nor did his stint as Director of Religious Life at the University of Mississippi, where his views on civil rights were far too radical, nor after that his assignment with the National Council of Churches. He thus found himself with "a call but no steeple," a sense of failure, doubt about himself (but not about his call), and "a penchant for self-destruction." What to do?

In this memoir Campbell tells how he regrouped on a rundown two-hundred year old farmhouse with forty acres and a goat named Jackson. There in rural Tennessee he has flourished as a Christian anarchist and rabble rouser. He's farmed, wrote nearly twenty books, hosted a steady stream of troubled people both famous and unknown, wrote country music, visited the sick and the imprisoned, and continued his curmudgeonly protest against the principalities and powers. If you were raised in the south as I was, have an interest in the civil rights movement, or want to enjoy one of the most irreverent Christians ever to irritate the church, then read Will Campbell. He was born and raised in the rural and very poor deep south of Amite, Mississippi, "ordained" by family members at a local Baptist church when he was seventeen, and, in a delightfully improbable life, played a central role as an activist and agitator on behalf of African Americans. In 1957, Campbell was one of four people who escorted the nine black students who integrated Little Rock's Central High School; and he was the only white person to attend the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. But he also made nice and sipped whiskey with the KKK Grand Dragon of North Carolina, believing that God's indiscriminate love embraces all of us without exception or conditions.

Will Campbell loves a good chew of tobacco and will strike many as enigmatic. Not everyone will appreciate his rapier wit. But PBS profiled him in their documentary "God's Will," in 2000 President Clinton honored him with a National Endowment for the Humanities medal, and his book Brother to a Dragonfly won numerous literary awards.