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Going Over Home

A Search for Rural Justice in an Unsettled Land

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

Booklist Editors' Choice "Best Books of 2019"


An intimate portrait of the joys and hardships of rural life, as one man searches for community, equality, and tradition in Appalachia

Charles D. Thompson, Jr. was born in southwestern Virginia into an extended family of small farmers. Yet as he came of age he witnessed the demise of every farm in his family. Over the course of his own life of farming, rural education, organizing, and activism, the stories of his home place have been his constant inspiration, helping him identify with the losses of others and to fight against injustices. In Going Over Home, Thompson shares revelations and reflections, from cattle auctions with his grandfather to community gardens in the coal camps of eastern Kentucky, racial disparities of white and Black landownership in the South to recent work with migrant farm workers from Latin America. In this heartfelt first-person narrative, Thompson unpacks our country's agricultural myths and addresses the history of racism and wealth inequality and how they have come to bear on our nation's rural places and their people.

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    • Booklist

      Starred review from September 1, 2019
      From a young age, Thompson felt a deep connection?a call, even?to the land. His grandparents and other forebears had been Virginia farmers, but changing times made it harder and harder to scratch out a living, until his parents were forced to find other means to raise their family. Even so, Thompson tried renovating and living in an old cabin on family land as a teen, studied agriculture in college, worked with agricultural nonprofits, all the while dreaming of owning and tending his own piece of ground. In his late twenties, the dream came true, but something was missing. Farming and communities supported by farming had changed irrevocably, and there were no easy answers or fixes. Thompson traces the changes in tax structures and how USDA policy in the 1970s drove farmers to buy more land and accumulate more debt, giving rise to industrial agriculture and the death of family farms. In addition, Thompson explores how racism deeply affects the process. Ultimately Thompson's search for "democratic values based on equal access to land" leads him from the farm to academia. This book deserves a place next to the writings of Wendell Berry, Henry David Thoreau, and Michael Pollan.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

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  • English

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