Pastoral Song
A Farmer's Journey
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4.5 • 16 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The acclaimed chronicle of the regeneration of one family's traditional English farm
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Winner of the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing * Named "Nature Book of the Year" by the Sunday Times * New York Times Editors' Choice * Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize * A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Sunday Times, Financial Times, New Statesman, Independent, Telegraph, Observer, and Daily Mail
"Superbly written and deeply insightful, the book captivates the reader until the journey’s end.” — Wall Street Journal
The New York Times bestselling author of The Shepherd’s Life profiles his family’s farm across three generations, revealing through this intimate lens the profound global transformation of agriculture and of the human relationship to the land.
As a boy, James Rebanks's grandfather taught him to work the land the old way. Their family farm in England's Lake District hills was part of an ancient agricultural landscape: a patchwork of crops and meadows, of pastures grazed with livestock, and hedgerows teeming with wildlife. And yet, by the time James inherited the farm, it was barely recognizable. The men and women had vanished from the fields; the old stone barns had crumbled; the skies had emptied of birds and their wind-blown song.
Hailed as "a brilliant, beautiful book" by the Sunday Times (London), Pastoral Song (published in the United Kingdom under the title English Pastoral) is the story of an inheritance: one that affects us all. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost. And yet this elegy from the northern fells is also a song of hope: of how, guided by the past, one farmer began to salvage a tiny corner of England that was now his, doing his best to restore the life that had vanished and to leave a legacy for the future.
This is a book about what it means to have love and pride in a place, and how, against all the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all.
[Published in the United Kingdom as English Pastoral.]
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this lyrical ode to traditional farming, Lake District farmer Rebanks (The Shepherd's Life) describes growing up on a small family farm during the rise of industrial agriculture over the past 40 years. As a boy, Rebanks learned from his grandfather to love the seasons of labor centered on the land, even as his stressed-out father exhibited the physical and economic hardships endured by farmers. The narrative interweaves tender reflections on the rhythms of farm life with pointed discussions of the differences between traditional (fertilizing fields with high quality cattle "muck," laying hedgerows by hand) and modern (heavy pesticide usage, separating crops and livestock) methods. Rebanks also details his father's distrust of environmentalists "who clearly had more comfortable lives than he did," and his own awakening to the importance of healthy soil through Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and government-funded ecology programs. Ultimately, Rebanks argues in favor of combining modern and historic practices in order to restore biodiversity and lessen the impact of climate change. Shot through with lyrical prose (the deeds to his grandfather's land "are like giant cardboard butterflies unfolding their wings") and intimate family memories, this is an immersive and stimulating call for change.
