Customer Reviews

Leaving the Land

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"Leaving the Land" by Douglas Unger is a sad book. It doesn't make you laugh much and it has few moments of inspiration. But it is nonetheless an entrancing and all-too-real portrait of the untidy death of a way of life in America. The book focuses on a farming community in South Dakota that is falling victim to changing economics and technological progress in the mid-20th century. As the farmers are forced to sell out and move on, the small town they revolve around begins to die, too. The story focuses on the farmer's daughter, Marge, who, as a young woman, has dreams of something better than herding turkeys all day long, but mistakenly links her happiness to finding a man. This proves to be a big mistake, of course, and she ends up hanging on in the small dying town. Midway through "Leaving the Land," the narrator changes to Marge's son, who recounts the town's demise and his mother's and his travails. Anyone who has enjoyed Kent Haruf's celebrated "Plainsong" will find "Leaving the Land" a worthy read. "Plainsong" is a tad better, primarily because of its comic sensibilities, but they are companion novels in the way they profile a dying way of life in the Great Plains. Like Haruf, Unger is an authoritative voice. It's clear that he personally has experienced many of the things that happen in the book, from working on a farm to experiencing the death of a community.

This is a beautifully written, haunting story of enormous change in our national landscape. I recently moved and packed my copy of it in a box labeled "Good Books." I have gotten ruthless about donating books that no longer hold meaning for me or whose ghost (digital) form would suffice, but I keep this one.

Deeply touching. Lovingly crafted. Worth keeping.

Picked this book up off the shelf in my house as we were packing to move. I read it when it first came out about 25 years ago and decided to give it another look and tore through it in a day and a half. I don't know why I didn't appreciate the book for what it is then, but I certainly do now. This is a magnificent portrayal of a way of life that is now lost to us. Unger's descriptive powers are phenomenal; his Dakota plains are every bit as vivid as Hardy's moor. Every character in the book is three dimensional and immediately recognizeable to anyone who has spent time in the American heartland. A beautiful, moving piece of work that should be required reading in every freshman English class. It is that good a piece of American literature. Apparently this book was nominated for a Pulitzer. Why it didn't win is a mystery to me. I'm ordering copies for gifts as soon as I'm done posting this review.