In telling the story of five generations of her
family and its farm in the Arkansas Delta, Margaret Jones Bolsterli
brings together her own research, historical perspective, and family
lore as it reaches her from the days of her great-grandfather down to
her nephew. The result is a family saga that is at once universal and
personal, historical and timeless. During Wind
and Rain moves from the land's acquisition in 1848 through
the Civil War and Reconstruction, the 1927 Flood, the Great Depression,
and the drought of 1930 to the modern considerations of mechanization,
fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation. The transformation of dense
swamp and forest to today's commercial agriculture is the story of two
hundred acres worked by people sowing their fate with sweat, ingenuity,
and luck. From the hoes of Bolsterli's great-grandfather Uriah's time
to her nephew Casey's machinery capable of cultivating an acre in five
minutes, During
Wind and Rain poignantly portrays five generations of
farmers motivated by dreams of "a crop so good that the memory of it
can warm the drafty floors of adversity for the rest of one's life."
|
During Wind and Rain
by
Margaret Bolsterli
University of Arkansas Press,
2008
Order
a copy
Reviewed in
The Book Stall
|
