Read Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land

Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land

John Graves

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Description:John Graves named it Hard Scrabble when he bought it—400 acres of rough Texas hill country at the far edge of what used to be the old Cotton Kingdom until overcropping, drouth, and hard winds stripped away most of the good dirt. Here Graves brought his family, built a house, raised goats and cattle, struggled with hardwood brush, cultivated some fields, leaving the rest to the dominion of the wild… In his book he makes us feel and understand his gradual commitment to this countryside—how, little by little, he came to feel a part of it, came to know its rocky ledges, earth and growing things, its scrub, cedar, and johnsongrass, its wolves, snakes, and wheeling buzzards, its special idiosyncrasies of light and weather. Always there is a sense of its past, "weighted with human remembrance"—of Indians who long ago camped there, of bootleggers hiding out, of cotton farmers, of loggers. There are wonderful stories of local people like old T. J. Mayes, "the fairest of the Laws," and Bill Macauley, who in a fight would "get him a bear hug on a man and then commence to eating"—all of them, like the author himself, living lives inextricably bound to this "patch of land." "Inside me," Graves writes, "there had always been the incipient disease of the land. I had never managed to purge myself of the simple yeoman notion that grass and crops and trees and livestock and wild things and water mattered somehow supremely, that you were not whole unless you had a stake in them, a daily knowledge of them." This knowledge he now shares. Profoundly knowing, set forth in a prose as sinewy as the tough cedar standing on Somervell County hillsides, his new book—like his wonderful Goodbye to a River—seems certain to become a classic.We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land. To get started finding Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
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ISBN: 0870744720

Description: John Graves named it Hard Scrabble when he bought it—400 acres of rough Texas hill country at the far edge of what used to be the old Cotton Kingdom until overcropping, drouth, and hard winds stripped away most of the good dirt. Here Graves brought his family, built a house, raised goats and cattle, struggled with hardwood brush, cultivated some fields, leaving the rest to the dominion of the wild… In his book he makes us feel and understand his gradual commitment to this countryside—how, little by little, he came to feel a part of it, came to know its rocky ledges, earth and growing things, its scrub, cedar, and johnsongrass, its wolves, snakes, and wheeling buzzards, its special idiosyncrasies of light and weather. Always there is a sense of its past, "weighted with human remembrance"—of Indians who long ago camped there, of bootleggers hiding out, of cotton farmers, of loggers. There are wonderful stories of local people like old T. J. Mayes, "the fairest of the Laws," and Bill Macauley, who in a fight would "get him a bear hug on a man and then commence to eating"—all of them, like the author himself, living lives inextricably bound to this "patch of land." "Inside me," Graves writes, "there had always been the incipient disease of the land. I had never managed to purge myself of the simple yeoman notion that grass and crops and trees and livestock and wild things and water mattered somehow supremely, that you were not whole unless you had a stake in them, a daily knowledge of them." This knowledge he now shares. Profoundly knowing, set forth in a prose as sinewy as the tough cedar standing on Somervell County hillsides, his new book—like his wonderful Goodbye to a River—seems certain to become a classic.We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land. To get started finding Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

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Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land

Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land

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