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Summary
Summary
Paulsen captures a vanishing way of life and offers a lyrical tribute to the american farm. "Paulsen's prose is realistic and down-to-earth....Ruth Wright Paulsen's paintings are an invitation to pause and imagine...a delight" (Christian Science Monitor). Illustrations by Ruth Wright Paulsen.
Author Notes
Gary Paulsen was born on May 17, 1939 in Minnesota. He was working as a satellite technician for an aerospace firm in California when he realized he wanted to be a writer. He left his job and spent the next year in Hollywood as a magazine proofreader. His first book, Special War, was published in 1966. He has written more than 175 books for young adults including Brian's Winter, Winterkill, Harris and Me, Woodsong, Winterdance, The Transall Saga, Soldier's Heart, This Side of Wild, and Guts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and the Brian Books. Hatchet, Dogsong, and The Winter Room are Newbery Honor Books. He was the recipient of the 1997 Margaret A. Edwards Award for his lifetime achievement in writing for young adults.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Gary Paulsen, author of adventure novels for young people, shows us a world of unremitting hard work and self-sufficiency in his powerfully elegiac account of the seasonal activities of a multigenerational farming family of Scandinavian descent on the northern Great Plains some 70 years ago. This is not exactly Lake Wobegon, but akin to it. Uncertainties and rewards provide a theme. Spring represents a time of birth for animal stock. Summer means plowing, collecting wild fruit and canning garden produce on wood stoves. Fall brings the harvest and its chores--killing animals for meat--while winter, nominally a period for the farm to rest, entails gathering firewood and logging timber (a cash crop). Everybody worked, even when they relaxed at the end of the day--women quilted or crocheted, and men sharpened tools as they spun tales. Any reader with a rural background will be transported by Paulsen to the past. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A lyrical and sensual celebration of four seasons on the American farm. Paulsen--a prolific and Newbery-winning children's author who's been venturing into the adult market lately (the thriller Kill Fee, 1990, etc.)--brings to this slim but rich appreciation a passion and wisdom not evident in his last adult nonfiction book, 1977's Farm. And also a burnished--at times preciously so--literary style, based on astute observation, wonderfully exact language, and definite cadence: ``[The thresher machine] holds, oh yes it holds, and the grates begin to shuffle back and forth, the small saw teeth ripple like water, oh yes, the keyway holds and the machine--she--groans and heaves and humps and bucks and in a great crashing of noise and year-old dust and mouse nests it is there. It is there.'' Paulsen begins with his inspiration for the book--a moving encounter with an 82-year-old farmer whose beloved horse has just died--and then devotes an essay to each season, spring to winter, drawing on his own memories and telling stories he's heard to evoke and honor--sometimes with considerable power--farm life. And the nine postimpressionist paintings by Ruth Wright Paulsen, the author's wife, nicely complement his colorful prose.
Booklist Review
In this evocation of seasonal flux on the early-twentieth-century farm, Paulsen creates a marvelous song of praise to that hard but full life. What could have been just a pleasant nonfiction becomes, in Paulsen's vivid language, a poem in prose that moves the senses as well as the emotions. Paulsen does not cast glamour over the life he describes: children are shredded to pulp by machinery, hogs roar out their last breath under the sharp fall knives, death hovers at the edge of each homestead. This harshness is counterbalanced, however, by the sensuality and passion of farming life: the Saturday night dance--"Reels and schottisches they play, almost in tune but with a grand solid beat that makes the guts jiggle and the feet slam into the floor to raise dust and sweat and then they dance, oh yes don't they dance"--or the fall apple pies--"Wrinkle-pinched around the edges and sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon, brown to golden with fork holes to let the steam out and little trails of sweet juices from the fork holes." Rich paintings by Ruth Wright Paulsen further make this a treasure of a book. ~--Pat Monaghan
Library Journal Review
This is a quintessential farm story filled with images of rich soil, warm sun, strong crops, sleek animals, and the ongoing cycle of labor from plowing to harvest. The people in Paulsen's tale are incidental to the work. Up before the sun, a family of work-roughened hands are always cooking and laying table, milking and harnessing horses, repairing machinery and delicately quilting. The reader is drawn in by the words and by the paintings of Paulsen's wife, Ruth Wright Paulsen, until they too feel the sweat and the strain of muscles, the heat of summer canning, the joy of a summer picnic, the ongoing rush to have enough food and just a little money to live another year on the farm. Where Richard Rhodes's Farm ( LJ 1/90) nails down the reality of agricultural life, Paulsen's Clabbered Dirt, Sweet Grass lets the reader dream of simpler, kinder times. This book is very well written and illustrated and will appeal to a general audience as well as one with a specific interest in farming or agriculture. Highly recommended.-- Debra Schneider, Virginia Henderson Internat. Nursing Lib., Indianapolis (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
