A Farm Dies Once a Year

by Arlo Crawford

Book Overview

A Book of the Month for GQ , The New Yorker , and Flavorwire "Beautifully told...In this one season of life, Crawford's writing about the work, people, nature and his family legacy reveals much about a simple life, and reminds us all to appreciate life's riches."-- Seattle Post Intelligencer "A must-read..."-- Washington Independent Review of Books An intimate, gorgeously observed memoir about family and farming that forms a powerful lesson in the hard-earned risks that make life worth living The summer he was thirty-one, Arlo Crawford returned home for the summer harvest at New Morning Farm--seventy-five acres tucked in a hollow in south-central Pennsylvania where his parents had been growing organic vegetables for almost forty years. Like many summers before, Arlo returned to the family farm's familiar rhythms--rise, eat, bend, pick, sort, sweat, sleep. But this time he was also there to change his direction, like his father years ago. In the 1970s, well before the explosion of the farm-to-table and slow food movement, Arlo's father, Jim, left behind law school and Vietnam, and decided to give farming a try. Arlo's return also prompts a reexamination of a past tragedy: the murder of a neighboring farmer twenty years before. A chronicle of one full season on a farm, with all its small triumphs and inevitable setbacks, A Farm Dies Once a Year is a meditation on work--the true nature of it, and on taking pride in it--and a son's reckoning with a father's legacy. Above all, it is a striking portrait of how one man builds, sows, and harvests his way into a new understanding of the risks necessary to a life well-lived.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080509816X
• ISBN13: 9780805098167
• Release Date: April 2014
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
• Length: 258 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.7"