Nothing But The Dirt

Author : Kate Benz
Publisher : University Press of Kansas
ISBN 13 : 0700633456
Total Pages : 252 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Nothing but the Dirt written by Kate Benz and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2022-07-15 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this work of creative nonfiction, author Kate Benz provides an intimate look at the present-day residents of Courtland, Kansas (population 285), a town whose economy depends almost entirely on agriculture. Through charming, first-person accounts, Nothing but the Dirt: Stories from an American Farm Town tells the whole story of life in Courtland, bucking the “Rural America is dying” narrative that so often proliferates national headlines about small-town USA. Throughout the book, Benz paints a picture of community that is unwilling to give up on each other. Macro-level issues such as rising tariffs, operation costs versus sinking commodity prices, and infusions of federal farm subsidies affect the locals’ daily livelihood, but it’s their love of their community that continues their collective efforts to keep Main Street open for business and Courtland on the map. These are the stories from one corner of rural America, told through the people who live there: the fourth-generation farmers, the young professionals, the transplants, the small business owners (many of whom are women)—a community that is nuclear, blended, straight, gay, red, blue, religious, and anything but. Young people who grew up in Courtland are moving back to raise their kids there, but instead of farming, they are opening breweries, boutiques, marketing agencies, or hair salons. They love rural life but want a new way to define it. Courtland is a community that is unwaveringly determined to keep their corner of rural America not only alive but thriving, refusing to let challenges define or deter them. Instead, they continuously find creative ways to overcome, adapt, improve, and move forward.

Author : Jeanine Cummins
Publisher : Holt Paperbacks
ISBN 13 : 1250209781
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Dirt (Oprah's Book Club) written by Jeanine Cummins and published by Holt Paperbacks. This book was released on 2022-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "También de este lado hay sueños. On this side, too, there are dreams. Lydia Quixano Perez lives in the Mexican city of Acapulco. She runs a bookstore. She has a son, Luca, the love of her life, and a wonderful husband who is a journalist. And while there are cracks beginning to show in Acapulco because of the drug cartels, her life is, by and large, fairly comfortable. Even though she knows they'll never sell, Lydia stocks some of her all-time favorite books in her store. And then one day a man enters the shop to browse and comes up to the register with four books he would like to buy--two of them her favorites. Javier is erudite. He is charming. And, unbeknownst to Lydia, he is the jefe of the newest drug cartel that has gruesomely taken over the city. When Lydia's husband's tell-all profile of Javier is published, none of their lives will ever be the same. Forced to flee, Lydia and eight-year-old Luca soon find themselves miles and worlds away from their comfortable middle-class existence. Instantly transformed into migrants, Lydia and Luca ride la bestia--trains that make their way north toward the United States, which is the only place Javier's reach doesn't extend. As they join the countless people trying to reach el norte, Lydia soon sees that everyone is running from something. But what exactly are they running to? American Dirt will leave readers utterly changed when they finish reading it. A page-turner filled with poignancy, drama, and humanity on every page, it is a literary achievement."--

Author : Bill Buford
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0385353197
Total Pages : 447 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dirt written by Bill Buford and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “You can almost taste the food in Bill Buford’s Dirt, an engrossing, beautifully written memoir about his life as a cook in France.” —The Wall Street Journal What does it take to master French cooking? This is the question that drives Bill Buford to abandon his perfectly happy life in New York City and pack up and (with a wife and three-year-old twin sons in tow) move to Lyon, the so-called gastronomic capital of France. But what was meant to be six months in a new and very foreign city turns into a wild five-year digression from normal life, as Buford apprentices at Lyon’s best boulangerie, studies at a legendary culinary school, and cooks at a storied Michelin-starred restaurant, where he discovers the exacting (and incomprehensibly punishing) rigueur of the professional kitchen. With his signature humor, sense of adventure, and masterful ability to bring an exotic and unknown world to life, Buford has written the definitive insider story of a city and its great culinary culture.

Author : Bram Presser
Publisher : Text Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1922253073
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Book of Dirt written by Bram Presser and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2017-08-28 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘An immense work of love and anger, a book Bram Presser was born to write.’ Joan London They chose not to speak and now they are gone...What’s left to fill the silence is no longer theirs. This is my story, woven from the threads of rumour and legend. Jakub Rand flees his village for Prague, only to find himself trapped by the Nazi occupation. Deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, he is forced to sort through Jewish books for a so-called Museum of the Extinct Race. Hidden among the rare texts is a tattered prayer book, hollow inside, containing a small pile of dirt. Back in the city, Františka Roubíčková picks over the embers of her failed marriage, despairing of her conversion to Judaism. When the Nazis summon her two eldest daughters for transport, she must sacrifice everything to save the girls from certain death. Decades later, Bram Presser embarks on a quest to find the truth behind the stories his family built around these remarkable survivors. The Book of Dirt is a completely original novel about love, family secrets, and Jewish myths. And it is a heart-warming story about a grandson’s devotion to the power of storytelling and his family’s legacy. Bram Presser was born in Melbourne in 1976. His stories have appeared in Best Australian Stories, Award Winning Australian Writing, The Sleepers Almanac and Higher Arc. His 2017 debut novel, The Book of Dirt, won the 2018 Goldberg Prize for Debut Fiction in the US National Jewish Book Awards, the 2018 Voss Literary Prize and three awards in the 2018 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards: the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing and The People’s Choice Award. ‘The lyrical, impassioned and culturally rich prose of The Book of Dirt, and its moral force, bears echoes of such great Jewish writers as Franz Kafka (Presser inherited his grandfather’s copy of The Trial), Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Cynthia Ozick...It is a major book, and one for the times: while I was reading it, neo-Nazis in America brought fatal violence to Charlottesville, and, in Melbourne, neo-Nazis placed posters in schools calling for the killing of Jews to be legalised...The Book of Dirt is a courageous work, as necessary for us to read as it was for Presser to write.’ Saturday Paper ‘A beautiful literary mind.’ A.S. Patrić ‘Meet Bram Presser, aged five, smoking a cigarette with his grandmother in Prague. Meet Jakub Rand, one of the Jews chosen to assemble the Nazi’s Museum of the Extinct Race. Such details, like lightning flashes, illuminate this audacious work about the author’s search for the grandfather he loved but hardly knew. Working in the wake of writers like Modiano and Safran Foer, Presser brilliantly shows how fresh facts can derail old truths, how fiction can amplify memory. A smart and tender meditation on who we become when we attempt to survive survival.’ Mireille Juchau ‘The Book of Dirt is a grandson’s tender act of devotion, the product of a quest to rescue family voices from the silence, to bear witness, drawing on legend, journey and history, and shaped by extraordinary storytelling.’ Arnold Zable ‘A remarkable tale of Holocaust survival, love and genealogical sleuthing...A beautiful tale that will stay with the reader long after the book’s end.’ Books+Publishing ‘It’s hard not to be captured from the opening epigraph...[A] magnificent ode to all that is lost.’ Longin to Be ‘It is difficult to convey the breadth and nuance of this extraordinary work. It is a book about how history is made—and about who is allowed the privilege to remake it. There are echoes here of Sebald’s biting honesty and Chabon’s long and rewarding vignettes. An absolute pleasure to read.’ Readings ‘As in Sebald’s prose narratives, Presser’s novel inhabits and the dynamic region between fiction and non-fiction.’ Australian Book Review ‘An impressive and captivating story of remembrance, a journey into the past for the sake of deciphering our present.’ Dasa Drndic ‘In The Book of Dirt the fractured lines of memory create a gripping story of survival and love.’ Leah Kaminsky ‘I found Bram Presser’s The Book of Dirt impossible to forget. Penetrating, soulful, and surprisingly welcoming, it reminded me of my own ancestors and how easy it is to sidestep the past.’ Barry Scott, Australian Book Review, 2017 Publisher Picks ‘Presser blurs the boundaries of fact and fiction in a compelling way...A wonderful and original book, told in rich, lyrically beautiful prose that is laden with history and cultural meaning.’ Good Reading ‘A combination of homage, mystery, family history and a sepia-toned love story...The Book of Dirt is magnificent.’ ANZ LitLovers ‘A heartfelt and original attempt to bridge the ever-growing gaps between history, memory and silence...Its heart beats so earnestly, and so loud...What Presser has produced is a meditation on the ethics of storytelling, of the duties we owe to the people whose stories we tell, and to the people whose stories we don’t.’ Australian ‘Always surprising and beautifully complex, and both deft and sensitive in its handling of its intertwined narratives and materials. It is an incredibly affecting book, one that lingers long after reading—and a remarkably assured debut.’ Age ‘A gripping tale of survival and an absorbing novelisation of his family’s extraordinary lives...Presser fills in the gaps in his grandfather’s story with vivid character studies; together with poignant black and white snapshots, he brings them evocatively to life. His poetic narrative is a perfect foil for the silences of his forbears.’ Toowoomba Chronicle ‘The Book of Dirt is both a loving, honest portrayal of lives that would have been erased, and an incorporation of the broader lessons of their experience into contemporary mythology. It keeps the discussion about trauma, memory, and intergenerational acts of transfer alive for those generations that follow, that risk forgetting. It is a potent achievement for a debut novel.’ Sydney Review of Books

Author : David R. Montgomery
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520933168
Total Pages : 299 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dirt written by David R. Montgomery and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-05-14 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dirt, soil, call it what you want—it's everywhere we go. It is the root of our existence, supporting our feet, our farms, our cities. This fascinating yet disquieting book finds, however, that we are running out of dirt, and it's no laughing matter. An engaging natural and cultural history of soil that sweeps from ancient civilizations to modern times, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations explores the compelling idea that we are—and have long been—using up Earth's soil. Once bare of protective vegetation and exposed to wind and rain, cultivated soils erode bit by bit, slowly enough to be ignored in a single lifetime but fast enough over centuries to limit the lifespan of civilizations. A rich mix of history, archaeology and geology, Dirt traces the role of soil use and abuse in the history of Mesopotamia, Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, China, European colonialism, Central America, and the American push westward. We see how soil has shaped us and we have shaped soil—as society after society has risen, prospered, and plowed through a natural endowment of fertile dirt. David R. Montgomery sees in the recent rise of organic and no-till farming the hope for a new agricultural revolution that might help us avoid the fate of previous civilizations.

Author : Sarah Nicole Lemon
Publisher : Abrams
ISBN 13 : 1683350596
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.90/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Done Dirt Cheap written by Sarah Nicole Lemon and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tourmaline Harris’s life hit pause at fifteen, when her mom went to prison because of Tourmaline’s unintentionally damning testimony. But at eighteen, her home life is stable, and she has a strong relationship with her father, the president of a local biker club known as the Wardens. Virginia Campbell’s life hit fast-forward at fifteen, when her mom “sold” her into the services of Hazard, a powerful attorney: a man for whom the law is merely a suggestion. When Hazard sets his sights on dismantling the Wardens, he sends in Virginia, who has every intention of selling out the club—and Tourmaline. But the two girls are stronger than the circumstances that brought them together, and their resilience defines the friendship at the heart of this powerful debut novel.

Author : Lisa Clough
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0544035666
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Nothing But Blue written by Lisa Clough and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All dead. No one survived. All dead. This morbid chant haunts seventeen-year-old Blue as she trudges through the countryside with just the clothes on her back, heading to her childhood home on the ocean. Something absolutely awful has happened, she knows it, but she doesn’t know what. She can’t even remember her name, so she calls herself Blue. This gripping survival story—peppered with flashbacks to bittersweet times with her boyfriend, Jake—strips life down to its bare bones. Blue learns, with the help of a seemingly magical stray dog and kind people along the road, that the important thing is to live.

Author : Myriam Gurba
Publisher : Coffee House Press
ISBN 13 : 1566895014
Total Pages : 198 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mean written by Myriam Gurba and published by Coffee House Press. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: True crime, memoir, and ghost story, Mean is the bold and hilarious tale of Myriam Gurba’s coming of age as a queer, mixed-race Chicana. Blending radical formal fluidity and caustic humor, Gurba takes on sexual violence, small towns, and race, turning what might be tragic into piercing, revealing comedy. This is a confident, intoxicating, brassy book that takes the cost of sexual assault, racism, misogyny, and homophobia deadly seriously. We act mean to defend ourselves from boredom and from those who would cut off our breasts. We act mean to defend our clubs and institutions. We act mean because we like to laugh. Being mean to boys is fun and a second-wave feminist duty. Being mean to men who deserve it is a holy mission. Sisterhood is powerful, but being mean is more exhilarating. Being mean isn't for everybody. Being mean is best practiced by those who understand it as an art form. These virtuosos live closer to the divine than the rest of humanity. They're queers. Myriam Gurba is a queer spoken-word performer, visual artist, and writer from Santa Maria, California. She's the author of Dahlia Season (2007, Manic D) which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, Wish You Were Me (2011, Future Tense Books), and Painting Their Portraits in Winter (2015, Manic D). She has toured with Sister Spit and her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach. She lives in Long Beach, where she teaches social studies to eighth-graders.

Author : Nick Hornby
Publisher : McSweeney's
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 172 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Housekeeping Vs. the Dirt written by Nick Hornby and published by McSweeney's. This book was released on 2006 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fourteen months of Hornby's warm, incisive, and hilarious chronicles of the books he buys and the books he reads.In this latest collection of essays following 'The Polysyllabic Spree,' critic and author Nick Hornby continues the feverish survey of his swollen bookshelves, offering a funny, intelligent, and unblinkered account of the stuff he's been reading. Ranging from the middlebrow to the highbrow (with unrepenting dips into the lowbrow), Hornby's dispatches from his nightstand table serve as useful guides to contemporary letters, with revelations on contemporary culture, the intellectual scene, and English football, in equal measure.

Author : Jennifer Ward
Publisher : Shambhala Publications
ISBN 13 : 1590305353
Total Pages : 178 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book I Love Dirt! written by Jennifer Ward and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2008-05-13 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I Love Dirt! presents 52 open-ended activities to help you engage your child in the outdoors. No matter what your location—from a small patch of green in the city to the wide-open meadows of the country—each activity is meant to promote exploration, stimulate imagination, and heighten a child's sense of wonder. Jennifer Ward is the author of numerous acclaimed parenting books and books for children, inspired by nature. "Jennifer Ward has created a book that will serve to gently introduce parents to nature, even as parents are using it to help guide a child into the narural world. Children—and parents—learn to observe, as well as appreciate, the basic joys of getting their hands dirty and feet wet. Discoveres become shared experience."—from the forword by Richard Louv