Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm

by Jane Brox

"A moving, graceful elegy for the American farm." --Larry Zuckerman, author of The Potato

"Nonfiction literature of a high and lasting order . . . Clearing Land , [Brox's] third book, parlays the resonantly detailed specifics of life on her immigrant family's farm in Massachusetts into a larger consideration of the meaning of cleared land and its relationship to other iconic locations in the American wilderness, prairie, mountain, city. Her precise, eloquent prose, wedded to a sensibility that manages to be at once elegiac and hard-minded, strikes unerringly through sentiment and convention to the heart of the matter . . . The result is a deeply affecting conclusion to her trilogy of books about living the consequences of natural process, human desire and the shifting balance between them."
-Carlo Rotella, Chicago Tribune

"Sings with the joy of life . . . Brox knows farming, but she knows writing even better . . . Clearing Land is a treasure."
-Jules Wagman, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Clearing land is the book's guiding metaphor, one that encompasses both time and space, and serves brilliantly to compare the material world and its flux with our attempts to understand it. . . This [Brox] does with eloquent melancholy."
-Katherine A. Powers, The Boston Globe

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Memoir, Nature

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

JANE BROX is the author of Clearing Land, Five Thousand Days Like This One, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Here and Nowhere Else, which received the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award. She lives in Maine"

Reviews

[Beth Browne · Rating 4 out of 5]

"To be responsible for so much land and yet be separated from the work of the land itself is its own weight: the farm in our minds is growing more distant and abstracted…We try to imagine what Dad would have done. We talk about what our mother might need for the future. How do you know what the future needs? It may be that the only way to preserve the farm would be to turn it into a kind of agrotourist destination with hayrides, apple picking, popcorn petting zoos. Then it may no longer be understood as necessary to any kind of daily life, but may stand only as a symbol of necessity. Preservation, then, would be the most self-conscious of acts."

Very interesting and well-written overview of farming in New England. Of particular interest to me as the owner of a family farm legacy.

[Sandy D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A slow non-fiction collection of essays on the history and ecology of the area around Lawrence, Mass. It took me about nine months to read this - not because it wasn't good, but because it is quiet reflective type of book that I kept putting down and then picking up weeks later, reading another chapter, and setting down again.

It's the third in Brox's trilogy of books about her family farm & orchard, but this one is more wide-ranging and less personal than the others. There's a lot about the ecology of salt marshes, a bit about Nantucket, the Grange movement, hiking, and development.

[Jen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Borrrrrrring. I tried. I really really did. Couldn't get into it.

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This lyrical book traces the history of New England farming with a twist; her intimate knowledge of agriculture is based in the experiences of her immigrant family who came to farming in Massachusetts in the 1920s. Each chapter explores a different New England environment, from “Island” to “Wilderness” to “The New City,” always coming back to its relation to farming. “Cultivation is a possession,” she argues, “an allegiance intertwined with necessity,” and she doesn’t shy away from the fact that that need for ownership has resulted in abuse of nature and pain in the family (181). But her love for the land always shines through and makes this a moving and thought-provoking read.

[Bounti Bounti]

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[Maddie Stein · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked up this book as I’m very interested in farming and grew up in New England, but I found the book boring and only slightly tied to farming. I felt it was hard to get to know the people described in the book, and the disjointed chapters/sections distracted from any apparent theme. Wish I enjoyed this more, but if your interest in farming is motivating you to read the book I’d choose something else.

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was overall a good writing with interesting bits of history and local information put forward, however there was an underlying sadness throughout the book.

[Thomas Glasoe · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the most boring I have ever read. Forced myself to finish it but would have read a manual on how to operate a vcr instead.

[Kathleen F · Rating 4 out of 5]

The third book in Brox's nonfiction trilogy about her family farm in Massachusetts. These are longer set pieces than in the first two essay collections in the series--Here and Nowhere Else and Five Thousand Days Like This One, and so none of them stand out quite in the same startling way as, for instance, "Influenza 1918." Nevertheless, Brox's prose is as gorgeous and lyrical as ever, We have a sense in this book--written after her father had died--that the farm is somehow more hers than it ever has been. It also has an elegiac tone that pervades each constituent essay; she is still trying to make the farm work, but somehow, we know, this can't last long. She is tied to this land not because she loves working it, but because of what it once represented to her family, and more specifically, to her father. Knowing that she has since sold the farm (as suburban sprawl has crept up around it) makes the work all the more poignant. A lovely book. But not for fainthearted readers who can't stand lyrical prose about, say, apple orchards, or the life on and around an industrial river.

[Caroljean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brox's writing captures not just the facts but the atmosphere of lifestyles past and present but dwindling. Beautifully written.

[Connor Kippe · Rating 5 out of 5]

no book has made me feel connection to a land and the emotions of rootedness and deprivation of those like this book.