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Title: Pleasant Valley (Mysteries & Horror) by Louis Bromfield ISBN: 1-888683-56-2 Publisher: Wooster Book Company Pub. Date: 01 June, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Pastoral and enriching.
Comment: I bought this because it was one of several valuable books recommended by Gene Logston in his own book, THE CONTRARY FARMER. Logston said that the chapter entitled, "My Ninety Acres" was one of his favorite short stories. After reading it, all I can say is: me too, me too.
Romantic? Sure. But it gets to the core of what is really important in life.
Rating: 5
Summary: Best farm book ever written.
Comment: Novelist Louis Bromfield won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1927 (Early Autumn). He wrote a total of 31 books in his lifetime. But, for my money at least, Pleasant Valley is the best book he ever wrote. Malabar Farm comes a close second. Bromfield's other farm books include: The Farm, 1933 Out of The Earth, 1950 Animals and Other People, 1955 From My Experience, 1955
In 1962, his youngest daughter, Ellen, wrote The Heritage -- A Daughter's Memories of Louis Bromfield. She tells the story of growing up in the shadow of her famous father and his Hollywood pals -- Bogie and Bacall were married at Bromfield's Malabar Farm in 1945 -- wonderfully well. But even better, I think is her 1957 Strangers In The Valley, the story of how she and husband Carson moved to Brazil to start a Bromfield-style farm on the new frontier there.
Jim Breiner is right: Louie Bromfield was a genius and a brilliant writer. Living in France in the '20s, he helped Hemingway first get published, and was compared favorably with Fitzgerald, thurber and Steinbeck, among others. His fiction is now dated, but his farm writing is immortal.
Rating: 3
Summary: A lovely idyll burdened with a repetitious polemic.
Comment: This was our book club's August selection, partly because Malabar Farm is nearby. Bromfield made his name as a fiction writer, but this is non-fiction, and it would be interesting to read one of Bromfield's novels to see if his fiction still has any power to capture an audience. "Pleasant Valley" has an ecological theme that resonates well with today's readers. Twenty-five years ago when I was reading 20th century American fiction with a bunch of know-it-alls in graduate school, Bromfield was not on any radar screen. Maybe it was snobbishness or academic fashion or whatever, but I had never heard of the guy until much later and then only in relation to Malabar Farm and Humphrey Bogart. The literary critics who mention major American writers of this century never mention his name. He may be a genius and a brilliant fiction writer who has gone unnoticed, but I wouldn't know.
This book is such a personal statement for Bromfield that it probably isn't fair to judge him as a writer on the basis of this book. What I was conscious of was the polemical nature of his writing. He hectors his readers with his opinions about agriculture and human culture. Granted, he is writing in the context of recent history that included a depression, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and the Second World War. He sees his farm as a refuge from the insanity of the world that is evident all around him. Some of that writing is quite nice and funny.
The book highlights the old contrast between city and country that is a literary theme as old as the ancient Greeks and Romans.
But after a while, I got tired of hearing the same arguments over and over. Let's see if I can summarize. Natural is better than unnatural. Farmers are cultural heroes. Rotating your crops is a good idea. Manure makes good fertilizer. Do your plowing perpendicular to the fall line of a hill. Rednecks are lazy and stupid because they are brought up on inferior agricultural products of farms that have been stripped of their vital nutrients. (This sounded a little like General Buck Turgidson's rant about fluoridation destroying our precious bodily fluids in "Dr. Strangelove.")
His focus on the loss of topsoil as a huge threat to civilization is understandable in light of what he could see happening in the 1940s. But farmers did change some of their practices. The book's appeal today, I thin, is as an example of pastoral writing with an ecological theme.
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Title: From My Experience: The Pleasures and Miseries of Life on a Farm by Louis Bromfield ISBN: 1888683554 Publisher: Wooster Book Company Pub. Date: 01 December, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Malabar Farm by Louis Bromfield ISBN: 1888683848 Publisher: Wooster Book Company Pub. Date: 01 June, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Farm by Louis Bromfield, James M. Hughes ISBN: 1888683333 Publisher: Wooster Book Company Pub. Date: 01 September, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Contrary Farmer (Real Goods Independent Living Book) by Gene Logsdon ISBN: 0930031741 Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Company Pub. Date: 01 May, 1995 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Early Autumn: A Story of a Lady by Louis Bromfield ISBN: 1888683317 Publisher: Wooster Book Co Pub. Date: 01 July, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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