22 February

Review: Time’s Shadow.” Remembering a Family Farm in Kansas

by Jon Katz
Farm memoir
Farm memoir

These book reviews are written in conjunction with Battenkill Books, my local independent bookstore. If you wish to purchase this book please consider buying it from Battenkill or your local independent bookstore. You can call the store at 518 677-2515 or e-mail Connie Brooks at [email protected] or visit the store’s website. They take Paypal and ship anywhere in the world. On Saturdays, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., I work at the store as Recommender-In-Chief. You can visit me and Red there, call the store or e-mail us. I have a list of great new books out that I’m happy to talk about.

“Time’s Shadow: Remembering A Family In Kansas.” Arnold J. Bauer. The University Of Kansas Press.

Arnold Bauer has written a poignant and lyrical memoir about the 160-acre family farm he grew up in Goshen Township, Clay County Kansas. The rise of the family farms in the Plains States began after the Homesteading Act in 1860 and lasted until the 1960’s, when government policy and other social and economic changes ended the very special century that marked the rise of the Family Farm. The book is the story of 100 years of the Bauer Farm, settled by Germans fleeing Europe and striking out in the new world.

Bauer eventually left his family’s farm to study abroad and teach in California. But the farm shaped him and touched him deeply, and although he is never maudlin, he will make you want to cry for this lost way of life, these vanished values, the grinding yet magical life farm children lived. It is always said that children who grew up on family farms are decades older than their peers. Bauer explains why.

Family farms were unique in America’s social structure. In most families, work and home are separate. On Family Farms, they are the same thing. Children were expected to work, contribute money, keep themselves safe from dangerous animals and equipment. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t. Bauer’s brother was killed in a farming accident when he was twelve.  Bauer was taught in a one room schoolhouse, his teachers knew him very well and held him accountable for his homework. Every day before school he had to go and set his muskrat trips so he could earn some extra money. He turned it all over to his mother and father. The idea of an allowance was unheard of, and no one ever asked him if he was having a happy childhood.

Bauer’s portrait of his family is beautiful and haunting. His exhausted parents worked day and night. Bauer’s mother never once spoke directly about her feelings about life, and his generous father helped bring electricity to neighboring farms for little or no money. Work on the farm was difficult and relentless and it shaped Bauer in ways that are almost possible for children to experience now. When Bauer was very young, his sister fell off of a tractor, and his father told him to get on and drive it. “My childhood was over,” he said. The family fought drought, locusts, broiling heat and freezing cold. In the end, Family Farms fed the country and its soldiers through World War II and then began their steady decline. Bauer’s farm was taken over by corporate farmers, the farmhouse permitted to rot away. Ten years after his mother withered away in one nursing home, Bauer took his broken-hearted and independent father to another, where he died four years later.

Almost all of the family farms in Kansas had withered away or been taken over by conglomerates by the mid 1960’s, a process that has spread to the rest of the country as well. Family farms are too small to compete in the new post World War II economy. Few farm children chose to stay and live such difficult lives. The small town where his father took Arnold to buy Milky Way bars for five cents as a reward for hard work  was gone, along with most of the county’s population. Goshen Township had become a ghost town.

I am not a farmer, but I live on a farm, and for some years I have been fortunate enough to photograph farmers and their struggle to survive. The family farmer I know are honest, generous and hard-working beyond imagination.They struggle on in the face of overwhelming obstacles, and a world that has left them behind. They seem heroic to me.

“Time’s Shadow” is the best farm memoir I have read. It is wonderfully and simply written, filled with anecdotes and rich characters. It brought me right into the Bauer farmhouse.  All across America, farm communities began to empty out as Americans moved to jobs on the coasts and in cities. Bauer never succumbs to false nostalgia and he never romanticizes farm life, which could be insular,  painful and difficult as he describes it.  His accounts of his family’s days are unsparing. But Family Farms were a keystone in the evolution of America, and the people who lived on them were forever changed and shaped by the work and responsibility demanded of them and the freedom given them to take risks and learn.

Bauer’s education for 14 years in a one room schoolhouse evokes a lost world of intimacy, discipline and shared values. It seems this is a world that is lost forever, thus it is all the more valuable to be able to experience it in this book.

This is one of the best books of 2012, in my reading. I recommend it highly. “Time’s Shadow” was written by Arnold J. Bauer and published by the University Press Of Kansas. “There was something to be learned from this century of my family’s life on a Kansas farm, and something to be loved,” wrote Bauer at the end of his book.

Amen to that.

23 February

The Battenkill Books Experiment: Jackie And Me

by Jon Katz
Jackie And Me
Jackie And Me

This is my fourth week working as  Recommender-In-Chief at the Battenkill Bookstore and I can’t speak for Connie Brooks, but it is a happy experience for me. We are selling a lot of books, recommending a lot of books. As it has turned out, the most surprising thing about this job has  turned out to be people – connecting to people who love books and bookstores and also who value the power of human connection. People are starving for human connection, for the value of one person knowing another in an increasingly fragmented and impersonal world. The job has been a great and unexpected boon for me. I am helping a wonderful independent bookstore rather than simply talking about helping bookstores. I am helping people find good books, I am helping writers find good readers. I am discovering some wonderful books that have reawakened my passion for reading, helped inspire and inform my writing. The job has led to doing something else I love, writing book reviews (I was a critic at one time.) The Battenkill Experiment is marked and bounded by people – some who come to the store, others who connect with me in different ways.

I can feel it building, one person, one recommendation, one review at a time. We will be rocking by summer and surely for Christmas. I will have a thousand good recommendations by then.

On my first day, my friend Bob Gray showed up. He was a bookseller when I met him, my model notion of a bookseller. His visit rekindled our friendship. Last week, Linda Wigmore, who has been following and posting on my blog for years, showed up with her new love. It was a gift to put a face to that name.

But perhaps the most powerful connections for me has been with Jackie, a woman I have never met and will most likely never meet. She lives in the Midwest and was the first person to call me on my first day working Saturdays at Battenkill Books. I knew little about her, except that her husband died recently, she gathers good books to read as winter deepens, she loves farms and has a deep interest in spirituality. Her parents are suffering from Alzheimer’s, she has a lot on her plate. She handles it with grace and dignity.  Reading is important to her. Like many people who call me for the first time, she was a bit uncomfortable, unsure of what to expect from me, anxious not to bother me or to seem too intrusive.

The minute she began talking, a series of books flashed through my mind to recommend to her. I don’t know how this works for me, it just does. She was shocked at how in sync we were. My job, I said.

Sometimes we just connect with people and that is what happened with Jackie and me. I recommended a mystery set in an art museum and she told me that her husband was an art historian. I recommended a book on Kansas farming (“Time’s Shadow,” which I reviewed yesterday) and she told me she spent time in Kansas as a child. I recommended a mystery set in Minnesota and that, she said, is where she lives. She ordered all of the books I recommended, and loved each one. She called back the second week to ask if I could recommend any books on Thomas Merton. I could, as it happened, since he inspired “Running To The Mountain.” Merton sparked my move upstate, my search for a spiritual grounding in my life.

Today she called again. Like everyone who deals with them, she loved calling Battenkill Books, appreciate the warmth and courtesy and service. She loved the first Merton book and was eager to sort her way through Merton’s many offerings. We talked about some books she might like. I told her how much I loved “Vampire In The Lemon Grove,” a new short story collection and suggested some other new books to put on her list. It is getting long and I am mindful of cost.  Some people wait for paperbacks, some have e-books, some go to the library. All are welcome. I suspect she will get to most of them in her time. Jackie and I have a connection, the kind of connection that remind us why we need bookstores and want them to survive.  And why we need people to survive as well. Our connection is literary – we only know one another through books. Yet  a person’s love of books can be quite revealing, and I feel as if I know her well. Our relationship means a lot to me, and perhaps to her. I always look for her messages when I get to the bookstore, and am so anxious to share my enthusiasm for some of the books I am reading. I told her that the experiment was doing well – Connie sold a dozen copies of “Times Shadow” within minutes of my review. It was good for me, I said. “Everybody wins,” she said, “it’s just a good idea.”

I wonder about Jackie sometimes, where she lives, who with. What she is like, what her work is. I look forward to knowing her better.

I am pleased to know you Jackie. I consider you a friend. You already know me better than many people in my life who have known me for years. And thank you. For loving writing. For spending a few extra dollars to support a value system that is larger than the cheapest price. For trusting me to guide you to some good work of deserving writers.  For loving good writing, a passion sometimes lost in the contemporary scrum. I think if you ever walked through the doorway of Battenkill Books, I would know you. I think I already do.

I like being “Recommender-In-Chief.” I might ask Connie for a name tag. Maybe a cap.

This weeks I will be reviewing two books I am very much into: “Middle Men” by Jim Gavin, short stories about the lives of men, and “After Visiting Friends,” a  mystery by Michael Hainey. Both will be available through Battenkill Books or your local independent bookstore.

12 January

Some Of My Recommended Books

by Jon Katz
Flo
Flo

I’ve gotten some requests for the names of the books and authors I recommended to people while working at Battenkill Books this afternoon. I’ll share some of them, and ask that you please consider purchasing them through Battenkill Books or your local independent bookstore, as part of the exercise is supporting independent stores. If money is an issue or you are more comfortable with e-readers, then that is, of course your business and nothing to feel uncomfortable about. I hope you enjoy the books and recommendations. You can call Battenkill at 518 677-2515 or visit their website, www.battenkillbooks.com. The selection, purchase and reading of books is intensely personal and I would no sooner tell you there is only one way to buy a book than I would say there is only one way to get a dog.

This is partial list, the full list is too long. I’ll share them in chunks when I can. They are not listed in any particular order of preference.

“Me Before You,” by Jojo Meyers.

“Ancient Light,” by John Banville, fiction.

– “The Art Forger,” by B.A. Shapiro. mystery.

– “Little Wolves,” by Thomas James Maltman, mystery.

– “Dear Life,” Stories by Alice Munro. fiction.

– “Gone Girl,” by Gillian Flynn. mystery.

– “The Fault in Our Stars,” YA title (good for adults) fiction by John Green.

– “Hikikomori And The Rental Sister,” by  by Jeff Backhaus, fiction.

– “The Stockholm Octavio” by Karen Engelman, historical mystery, fiction.

– “Time’s Shadow: Remembering A Family In Kansas,” by Arnold J. Bauer, memoir.

– “One Last Thing Before I go,” by Jonathan Tropper, fiction.

– “One Man’s Meat,” essays by E.B. White.

– “Moscow, 1937,” by Karl Schlogel. History.

– “Defending Jacob,” by William Landay, mystery.

– “Behind The Beautiful Forever,” by Katherine Boo. Non-fiction.

– “Wild,” by Cheryl Strayed. memoir.

I’ll be reviewing “Ancient Light” on Sunday.

 

 

Bedlam Farm