An American Homeplace - Hardcover

McCaig, Donald

3.65

51 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0517584875 ISBN 13: 9780517584873

Publisher: Crown, 1992

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On a September day in 1971, Donald McCaig and his wife, Anne, arrived at their new home, an abandoned farm in the least populated county in eastern America. Over the next twenty years they learned - one challenging day at a time - how to raise sheep and grow enough food for themselves and their stock.
The story of the McCaigs' farm, from the time it was first cultivated in the eighteenth century to the McCaigs' struggle to keep it productive today, is at the heart of An American Homeplace. Amplifying that personal account are the voices of farmers, storekeepers, horse breeders, mechanics, and other country people.
McCaig writes wonderfully about his working dogs, the animals he raises, and the wild animals he encounters; the seasons of the farmer's year; the ways of rural society; the ageless challenges of agriculture; and the modern dangers of agribusiness.
This is the history of the American family farm, an institution built on personal honesty, trust in one's neighbors, and optimism about the future. An American Homeplace is a wise and powerful report on a part of America that is struggling - often ingeniously - to survive.

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About the Author:

Donald McCaig is a regular commentator on NPR's All Things Considered and the author of Nop's Trials, Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men, and the forthcoming novel Jacob's Ladder. He and his wife, Anne, operate a sheep farm in the mountains of western Virginia.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Essays on rural life by NPR commentator McCaig (Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men, 1991; Nop's Trials, 1984, etc.). McCaig's historical piece about the remote Virginia region where he lives and why he gave up Manhattan is unfocused and gets the book off to an uncertain start. Nor do the two-page essays, written for radio, and the longer essays, created for publications such as The Atlantic, contribute to a unified whole. Read individually, however, McCaig's pieces are lyrical and timely. The joys of country life come through in meditations on being snowbound, when one can read in peace and savor the food one has laid by. Farm animals provide satisfaction: the pleasures of working stock with dogs, or the nearly human frailties of sheep. But McCaig has doubts about the life he and his wife have carved out: City friends are far more prosperous, and everywhere he looks rural communities are failing. There are fewer farmers; every old method, which took from the land but also preserved it, is being subsumed by the assembly-line style of agribusiness. In his concluding essays, McCaig seeks out several visionaries, asking, in effect, ``Can we save rural America?'' Helen Nearing and the now- deceased Scott Nearing were the famous radicals of the 1950's who, with Living the Good Life and its sequels, inspired ``back-to-the- land''--but McCaig feels the movement has died. Wendell Berry, while an admirable philosopher and poet, also seems anachronistic. The nearest thing to hope comes in Kansas, from Wes Jackson, with his elaborate experiments with the right crops for the right regions. McCaig brings a kind of loving humility to his subjects, a rare quality. His collection is uneven, but, at its best, pure and moving. (Twenty halftones--not seen.) -- Copyright �1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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