Rural Life

Alec Wilkinson

Klinkenborg has a singular affinity for the natural world and because he is such an accomplished writer...

Gregory Long

Klinkenborg has a poetic vision...takes his place among the best American writers about the natural world...

Jack Valenti

...no journalist...surpasses his liquid prose, which he offers with such ease and fluency...

Michael Korda

At once lyrical and down to earth...brilliantly takes the reader to the very heart of living in the country...

New York Times Book Review

brief, luminous essays...calls to mind Gilbert White and Thoreau...a work of almost uninterrupted felicity..
—12/1/02

Seattle Times/Post Intelligencer

..contains inquiry and ideas of substance...
—11/24/02

Tom Brokaw

...not only a rich and evocative pastoral pilgrimage, it is a national treasure...Klinkenborg is our modern Thoreau...

Publishers Weekly

Klinkenborg's third book (after Making Hay and The Last Fine Time) is a selection of columns originally appearing on the New York Times editorial page under the heading "A Rural Life." They document in vivid detail the daily challenges of life in the country, and on a farm in particular. Though the columns are drawn from seven years of writing, the book is organized into a single year-12 chapters starting in "January" and ending in "December"-and flits from topic to topic, relying on a few short passages of news or descriptions of holidays to mark the passage of time. Likewise, the author never sticks to one place for long, but ranges across the continent of the U.S. and glimpses events in dozens of country towns from Wyoming and New Hampshire to Minnesota and New Mexico. Some episodes are emblematic of contemporary American culture: a high school football game, President Clinton's dedication of Walden Pond, the disquiet in the days following September 11. Others are more intimate passages discussing the author's family and the solace he finds in keeping bees, stacking hay or simply turning earth. Though this highly personal chronicle lacks any narrative arc other than the changing of the seasons and the author's emotional reaction to them, nothing in the prose is accidental, and the deliberate, finely hewn sentences convey, above all else, the seriousness with which Klinkenborg takes the task of watching the world around him. A heady meditation on our relationship to nature, echoing the works of the transcendentalists Thoreau and Emerson, the writing is much closer to poetry than essay. (Dec.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Klinkenborg is a member of the editorial board of the New York Times and author of Making Hay. This collection of essays, most of which have previously been published in the NYT and elsewhere, describe his experiences of rural life, from his farm in upstate New York and in the American West. When a book is a compilation of essays, it can often suffer from a lack of continuity or context. While these selections are gathered according to month, they leap from geographic locations without regard to year; in fact, there is no indication of when they were written (except a couple references to 9/11). Klinkenborg explains: "If spring seems to be well advanced on one page and balky and weeks behind on the next...I'm probably describing two very different springs." Because he writes so well, one can endure the bumpy ride. Recommended for public and academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 8/02.]-Lee Arnold, Historical Soc. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

From the New York Times writer (The Last Fine Time, 1990) and editorial-board member, a gathering of pieces that have appeared over the years (mainly in the Times) quilted into a single year, a chapter a month. Result: captivating, subtle, and splendid. Times readers will have the special treat of familiar essays, like bumping unexpectedly into a friend in some far-away place: here are the pieces, for example, about the Colorado blizzard and awful school bus disaster of 1931; the summer of rain and humidity ("It's been like living under a rhubarb leaf"); even pigs ("I've been thinking about raising pigs. Ask anyone who knows me"). Klinkenborg really is a Thoreau for today, complete with classic upside-downings ("My plan in buying this small farm wasn't to tutor the pasture and the sugar maples and the hemlocks. I hoped instead to let the landscape tutor me, to lie fallow for a while myself") and metaphors that give as much pleasure (and meaning) as their subjects themselves: the Wyoming grasshoppers, for example, that find the morning sun, "where they wait until they're fully charged, ready to go off," or the simple observation ("October") that "the sun has made its way southward like the fox that crosses the pasture most evenings." The biggest pleasure, though, is Klinkenborg's gradual sculpting of this whole philosophical year, beginning always with simple observations of place, work, and weather, chipping away until nothing's left at the end but something perfect. Now and again a factoid will be left in-about father, wife, boyhood in Iowa-as if just to give us a tiny glimpse of this person whose voice we hear talking. Holidays get their brief, perfected, ruminative moments ("MemorialDay is the porch before the house of summer"), as do other enormous subjects, including the universe, WWI, and the World Trade Center. Nonfiction storytelling at its highest: unflaggingly lovely, with scope, profundity, and power achieved through a mastering of the delicate.