All Shall Be Well: A Review of Raft of Stars
Then I read a book like Raft of Stars, and I am again filled with wonder. Not just at nature–at rivers, forests, and fields–but at my children themselves.
Clarkson’s Farm, a Folly Worth Watching
By the end of season one of Clarkson's Farm, Clarkson is still not an expert on anything farming related, but he is learning all the time, including about the area where he lives and how to love it well.
When Work Disappears: A Review of The Other Side of Prospect
Certainly there is a need for a national conversation and national solutions... But reading The Other Side of Prospect, one is left with the sense that the ultimate authors of Newhallville’s future revitalization, if it is to occur, will be its community members
Saving String, Kicking Leaves: Donald Hall’s Elegies
Hall’s elegiac poetry and prose teach grim lessons that are worth heeding, but there is also a sort of unsentimental, necessary hope—a hope for continuity and unexpected rebirth, a hope that keeps open a sense of possibility—that shines obscurely beneath their grief.
A Review of Verlaine Stoner Mcdonald’s The Red Corner
In her 2010 book, The Red Corner: The Rise and Fall of Communism in Northeastern Montana, Verlaine Stoner McDonald resurrects the surprising but largely forgotten episode of agrarian radicalism in Sheridan County, Montana. Over ten years after its publication, McDonald’s stellar work of microhistory continues to provide food for thought to readers interested in both the political promise and limits of agrarianism, localism, and left-wing populism.
Infinite Baseball review
The official scorekeeper for my sixth-grade baseball team was our catcher’s mom. Sometimes she couldn’t be there, and it would fall to our coach...
Captioning Over our Grief
In the spirit of Oscar season, we do well to look back at what the 2017 ‘Academy’ ignored. One such film is this fall’s...
Blessed Are the Working Poor
I am in love with my neighborhood because I am in love with the people, how resilient and complicated they are, and how they teach me how wrong I have been about the world. They have proven to me what Jesus said in his most famous sermon, the one on the mount: “blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God.”
Truly “Another Life is Possible”
The Bruderhof do not blindly follow the status quo but have chosen to organize their life around simplicity, self-sacrifice, and peace.
Reading Chatwin in Silesia
When I moved to Poland it was the first time I had left Britain. I have lived in the same town for four years...