Larry McMurtry A fine book: sombre, provocative, filled with both common and uncommon sense about farming as it is -- and as it was. Without idealizing farmers it gives the land its due.

Richard A. Wilson Director, California Department of Forestry The people who founded America were from the land. Yes, perhaps a bit aristocratic, but nevertheless landed. Today this class has become virtually extinct, and Victor Davis Hanson is now almost alone in his understanding of the importance of the discipline of the man-land relationship that will disappear with the loss of our few remaining yeomen.

Dr. Kevin Starr State Librarian of California and Author of The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940's In these evocative and elegiac letters the Fresno farmer, poet, philologist and agrarian philosopher Victor Davis Hanson laments the passage of a style of living which since Classical times has served as reality and metaphor for the well-ordered life. From the heat-soaked vineyards of the Central Valley of California comes this cry of the heart, this elegy, this wry and courageous act of celebratory defiance.