The Land Was Everything - by Victor Davis Hanson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A firsthand perspective on the modern farmer's struggle against drought, disease, insects, rodents, government bureaucracy, financial overload--and how those challenges promote qualities like independence, stoicism, and resolution.

Before storms that can destroy his crops in an instant, the farmer stands implacable. To fluctuations in temperature that can deprive his children of their future, the farmer pays no heed. Every day the elements remind him that his future is secure only through constant effort. Like the creepers and crawlers he seeks to eradicate, the farmer toils away in the lush anonymity of his grid of vines, his tradition one of impervious resolve.

Today that tradition of muscular, self-effacing labor is quietly disappearing, as the last of America's independent farmers slowly fade away. When they have gone, what will we have lost? In The Land Was Everything, Victor Davis Hanson, an embattled fifth-generation California grape farmer and passionate, eloquent writer, answers this question by offering a final snapshot of the yeoman, his work, and his wisdom. He shows that there is worth in the farmer beyond the best price of raisins or apples per pound, beyond his ability to provide fruit out of season, hard, shiny, and round. Why is it, then, that the farmer is so at odds with global culture at the millennium? What makes the farmer so special?

To find the answer Hanson digs deeply within himself. The farmer's value is not to be found in pastoral stereotypes--myths that farmers are simple and farming serene. It is something more fundamental. The independent farmer, in his lonely, do-or-die struggle, is tangible proof that there is still a place for heroism in America. In the farmer's unflinching, remorseless realities--rain and sun, hail and early frost--lie the best of humanity tested: stoicism, surprising intelligence, and the determination that comes from fighting battles, tractor against vine, that must be replicated a thousand or a hundred thousand times if a farmer is to have even a chance of success.

The land was everything that once made America great and democracy strong. Will we still like what we are--and can we survive as we are--when the land is nothing?

Review Quotes

Dr. Kevin Starr State Librarian of California and Author of The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940's In these evocative and elegiac letters the Fresno farmer, poet, philologist and agrarian philosopher Victor Davis Hanson laments the passage of a style of living which since Classical times has served as reality and metaphor for the well-ordered life. From the heat-soaked vineyards of the Central Valley of California comes this cry of the heart, this elegy, this wry and courageous act of celebratory defiance.

Larry McMurtry A fine book: sombre, provocative, filled with both common and uncommon sense about farming as it is -- and as it was. Without idealizing farmers it gives the land its due.

Richard A. Wilson Director, California Department of Forestry The people who founded America were from the land. Yes, perhaps a bit aristocratic, but nevertheless landed. Today this class has become virtually extinct, and Victor Davis Hanson is now almost alone in his understanding of the importance of the discipline of the man-land relationship that will disappear with the loss of our few remaining yeomen.

About the Author

Victor Davis Hanson is a conservative commentator, classicist, and military historian. He has been a commentator on modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Review, The Washington Times, and other media outlets.