The Land Remembers: The Story of a Farm and Its People (Wisconsin) [Paperback]

Ben Logan (Author), Paul Zimmer (Foreword)

Book Description

Series: Wisconsin | Publication Date: July 1999

- Author of the best-selling book Christmas Remembered. - Features beautiful, descriptive prose essays.

Editorial Reviews

Review

In The Land Remembers Ben Logan is strikingly successful in recalling his own boyhood world, a lonely ridge farm in southwestern Wisconsin . . . he reviews his growing-up years in the 1920s and 30s less with nostalgia than with a naturalist s eye for detail, wary of the distortions of memory and sentiment. --The Christian Science Monitor

Reading Logan s memoir is like a refreshing vacation from the demands and problems of modern life. A book to be cherished and remembered. --Publisher's Weekly

What drew me so irresistibly through The Land Remembers?. . . How can you feel nostalgia for things that never happened to you? How can you miss people just as you re meeting them for the first time?. . . You feel nostalgia when the details of a world are so precisely concrete and right that by the time the author tells you his own reactions to that world you feel you already know it just about as well as he does. . . . It s not nostalgia for my own past that The Land Remembers made me feel; it s nostalgia for a world he makes me wish I'd known. --The New York Times

In The Land Remembers Ben Logan is strikingly successful in recalling his own boyhood world, a lonely ridge farm in southwestern Wisconsin . . . he reviews his growing-up years in the 1920s and 30s less with nostalgia than with a naturalist s eye for detail, wary of the distortions of memory and sentiment. --The Christian Science Monitor

Reading Logan s memoir is like a refreshing vacation from the demands and problems of modern life. A book to be cherished and remembered. --Publisher's Weekly --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Ben Logan traveled as a merchant seaman, and worked many years as a novelist, producer and writer of films and television, and lecturer, while living forty miles north of New York City. Yet his roots remained in the southwestern driftless area of Wisconsin. He returned to his childhood farm, Seldom Seen, in the mid-1980s, and has lived there ever since. Ben was born and raised on the farm and attended Seneca High School before studying journalism at UW-Platteville and UW-Madison. He spent 4 1/2 years in the navy during WWII on amphibious landing craft in combat in North Africa and Italy. After the war, Ben worked as a merchant seaman in Europe and South America, then returned to Wisconsin to complete his master's degree. Further travels took him to Mexico to study anthropology and creative writing. In Mexico, he met his wife. From 1960-1985, Ben was senior producer for United Methodist Communications in New York state. He won an Emmy award for best-written documentary film, Taking Children Seriously, which aired on NBC-TV in 1986. UW-Platteville gave him the Distinguished Alumnus Award in 1984. His book, The Land Remembers, was published in 1975, and is now in its eighth edition. It is something of a phenomenon, and has sold nearly half a million copies. In the latest edition, two original chapters have been reunited with the story, and included in a new Afterword that brings his story about growing up on a farm in the '30s full-circle, back to the land and its people. The birth of that land, like the birth of the planet, is beyond our comprehension. We can theorize about cosmic dust, planetary collisions, rivers of molten rock, land rising out of the sea to be worn down again by wind and water, but how real is all that compared to the feel of the morning sun on the face, the smell of the seasons changing, the sight of the new green springing from the soil? Ben also wrote The Empty Meadow in 1983 and Christmas Remembered. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Creative Publishing International; 25th edition (July 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559717181
• ISBN-13: 978-1559717182
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,011,716 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of my favorites!, January 26, 2000

By 

Linda Fletcher (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Land Remembers: The Story of a Farm and Its People (Wisconsin) (Paperback)

This book is full of humor and spends wonderful time on how a farm is run, explaining the land, the chores, the wonder of living on a farm. Ben's antics with his brothers are delightful, and his account of his evenings with his family are memorable. I read this anytime I need a lift, and share its richness with anyone who will listen.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A time capsule of growing up on a farm., January 16, 2000

By 

Mary & Bobby (WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Land Remembers: The Story of a Farm and Its People (Wisconsin) (Paperback)

One room school house, the changing of the seasons and the farm chores for each one...a memior of one man's boyhood experiences. I liked this book and my husband liked it even more than I did. He was born and raised in rural WI, picking rocks, milking, and going sledding with his brothers. This book is well written and reads like a time capsule...the people & chores on a family farm. I would have given it a perfect 5 stars, but there is too much about bees. Less bee watching and the author would have a classic here. Great that his story goes full circle. We learn what happens to the people we've read and cared about...which is always gratifying to us readers.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of my all time favorites, August 27, 2001

By 

lanoitan (United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Land Remembers: The Story of a Farm and Its People (Wisconsin) (Paperback)

This is one of those books I will always remember. My children were young when I read it and I felt that it contained many lessons on how to be a good parent. And all in the context of very enjoyable reading. The story about learning to use the horse drawn cultivator shows how a parents help their child develop self-confidence, which is something I see so many people lacking. I can't say enough good things about this gem of a book.