A Good Day's Work: An Iowa Farm in the Great Depression [Hardcover]

Dwight W. Hoover (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 18, 2007

Despite beautiful landscapes and bountiful harvests, farming is hard work and always has been. The Great Depression in rural America, which began in the 1920s and lasted until World War II, made it still harder. At a time when tractors were replacing horses and the family farm was giving way to the large, single-crop enterprise, the struggle to survive and modernize in a period of economic scarcity was especially sharp. In A Good Day's Work, Dwight Hoover, who grew up on an Iowa farm in this era, recalls the events of day-to-day life on a single farm, offering detailed descriptions of daily work in each of the year's four seasons. A Good Day's Work is a fascinating if grim reminder of what it was like to be a child with adult responsibilities. Mr. Hoover's unusual memoir recalls the rough edges as well as the happy moments of rural life. It is an honest re-creation of a world that was vanishing.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Absorbing picture of the skills and privation that went into the making of both a person and a way of life. (Cranberg, Gilbert )

The most detailed and artful telling of family farming that I have read. . . . A valuable contribution to agricultural history. (Quinney, Richard )

A delightful read. . . . A poignant record of an agricultural age that will never return. (Hurt, R. Douglas )

Hoover does an exemplary job of recreating a vanished world. . . . A high quality book. . . . A 'must read to enjoy' book. (Manhattan Mercury )

Will captivate anyone interested in agricultural history or in the way their grandparents lived. (Smith, Darrell Farmjournal )

Richly detailed accounting of the ways of another time. A fine memoir. (Indiana Magazine Of History )

One of the best accidental economists I have ever encountered. (Erwin, Adam Dtn Online )

Poignant, personal and riveting in its warts-and-all recollections of chores, school and the everyday infrastructure of rural life, A Good Day's Work will take you back to a time and place that fade a little more into America's forgotten past with each passing generation. (American Profile )

A lucid and highly effective history of farm life that will be of immense value both to lay readers and to professional historians. (Fearon, Peter The Historian )

Review

"Four lyrical interspersed chapters in A Good Day's Work describe farm life during each season of the year."

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Ivan R Dee (April 18, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566637023
• ISBN-13: 978-1566637022
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #983,160 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An interesting farm history, July 19, 2007

By 

Delpha M. (Florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Good Day's Work: An Iowa Farm in the Great Depression (Hardcover)

A Good Day's Work Dwight W. Hoover

This book brought back many memories for me of visiting my older sister living on a farm in Indiana during the fifties. I also loved to hear my mother telling stories of growing up on a farm in Indiana in the early 1900's. There is much about farm life described by the author that is similar over these decades. He describes the hard work, the co-operation, family bond and the community spirit that seems to me to be a common thread throughout farm life. This book caused me to think about the family values and personal ethics that are less a part of our lives today as not only farming but other occupations have changed in the United States. The hard work, long days and financial uncertainty remain for those family farmers trying to continue the traditional way of farming in the mid-west. The author shares the right amount of antidotal stories that causes the reader to feel he/she knows this farm family. Sharing their experiences through the writing of one of the members of the Hoover family makes this book a joy to read.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Good Day's Read, July 27, 2007

By 

mmm (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Good Day's Work: An Iowa Farm in the Great Depression (Hardcover)

Although Mr. Hoover's book evoked no memories for me (I was born and raised in Chicago), I was completely absorbed and enchanted. He brings alive a different time and place so vividly that he carries his reader there with his descriptions and stories. Although he apparently means this book as a gift to his grandsons, it is equally a gift to all of us who can get lost in its pages!

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An ok but not brilliant view of life on the farm, July 20, 2008

By 

Robert C. Ross (New Jersey) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Good Day's Work: An Iowa Farm in the Great Depression (Hardcover)

Dwight W. Hoover describes his boyhood on a 100-acre Iowa family farm in the 1930s. I grew up on a 100-acre dairy farm in Wisconsin a few years later, and to some extent his account resonated with me.

Our family, like his, tried and failed to come to grips with the "get big or get out" realities of American agriculture. The Iowa Highway Commission delivered a major blow with its decision to "construct a state highway through my father's farm," destroying the family's orchard.

Our family, like his, moved from horse power (mule power in our case) to tractors. It was important to grow more cash crops and re-fence to allow "full utilization of the tractor's potential." His chapter on the factors involved in this conversion is one of the most interesting and insightful of the entire book: the increase in the need for cash, changes in crops, the elimination of work stock, the arrangement of fences and fields, and the use of farm buildings.

He hated many of the farm chores: manure hauling, castration and the killing. But, "pumping water was no more boring than working out in a gym, and at least the exercise was outdoors in clean air." He writes with some pleasure of the 4-H and Future Farmers of America programs, and his competitions at the local fairs.

At the end of the day, he leaves farming as a teenager. There's a bit of regret in his telling of his story, but he clearly enjoyed his professor's life more. This is a useful book for anyone interested in the conversion from animal to tractor power on mid-western farms.

The "Wall Street Journal" reviewed this book with Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression (I purchased them both because of the coincidence of my own upbringing). Mildred Armstrong Kalish describes a warmer, perhaps happier culture, but the two books describe a similar life style. Perhaps, most revealing, both authors left the farm when they were able to do so as teenagers.

Robert C. Ross 2008