Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land

ISBN: 1477309357

Author: Graves, John

Condition: New

A kind of homemade book-imperfect like a handmade thing, a prize. Its a galloping, spontaneous book, on occasion within whooping distance of that greatest and sweetest of country books, Ivan Turgenevs A Sportsmans Notebook. -Edward Hoagland, New York Times Book ReviewHis subjects are trees and brush, hired help, fences, soil, armadillos and other wildlife, flood and drought, local history, sheep and goats . . . and they come to us reshaped and reenlivened by his agreeably individual (and sometimes cranky) notions. -New YorkerIf Goodbye to a River was in some sense Gravess Odyssey, this book is his [version of Hesiods] Works and Days. It is partly a book about work, partly a book about nature, but mostly a book about belonging. In the end John Graves has learned to belong to his patch of land so thoroughly that at moments he can sense in himself a unity with medieval peasants and Sumerian farmers, working with their fields by the Tigris. -Larry McMurtry, Washington Post Book WorldHard Scrabble is hard pastoral of the kind we have learned to recognize in Wordsworth, Frost, Hemingway, and Faulkner. It celebrates life in accommodation with a piece of the given creation, a recalcitrant four hundred or so acres of Texas cedar brake, old field, and creek bottom, which will require of any genuine resident all the character he can muster. -Southwest Review