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 : 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 : 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 : 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 : 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 : Christine Byl
Publisher : Beacon Press
ISBN 13 : 0807001015
Total Pages : 229 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dirt Work written by Christine Byl and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2013-04-16 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively and lyrical account of one woman’s unlikely apprenticeship on a national park trail crew—and what she discovers about nature, gender, and the value of hard work Christine Byl first encountered the national parks the way most of us do: on vacation. But after she graduated from college, broke and ready for a new challenge, she joined a Glacier National Park trail crew as a seasonal “traildog” maintaining mountain trails for the millions of visitors Glacier draws every year. Byl first thought of the job as a paycheck, a summer diversion, a welcome break from “the real world” before going on to graduate school. She came to find out that work in the woods on a trail crew was more demanding, more rewarding—more real—than she ever imagined. During her first season, Byl embraces the backbreaking difficulty of the work, learning how to clear trees, move boulders, and build stairs in the backcountry. Her first mentors are the colorful characters with whom she works—the packers, sawyers, and traildogs from all walks of life—along with the tools in her hands: axe, shovel, chainsaw, rock bar. As she invests herself deeply in new work, the mountains, rivers, animals, and weather become teachers as well. While Byl expected that her tenure at the parks would be temporary, she ends up turning this summer gig into a decades-long job, moving from Montana to Alaska, breaking expectations—including her own—that she would follow a “professional” career path. Returning season after season, she eventually leads her own crews, mentoring other trail dogs along the way. In Dirt Work, Byl probes common assumptions about the division between mental and physical labor, “women’s work” and “men’s work,” white collars and blue collars. The supposedly simple work of digging holes, dropping trees, and blasting snowdrifts in fact offers her an education of the hands and the head, as well as membership in an utterly unique subculture. Dirt Work is a contemplative but unsentimental look at the pleasures of labor, the challenges of apprenticeship, and the way a place becomes a home.

Author : Samuel Finlay
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780615622996
Total Pages : 318 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Breakfast with the Dirt Cult written by Samuel Finlay and published by . This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I'm going to make a pinkie-swear with you right here and now, Tom Walton; when, not if, you return from Afghanistan, you must come up here and I will have a mad passionate affair with you..." With this proposal, Thomas Walton, an infantry soldier in Alpha Company, Second Platoon, arrives at the threshold of events that will change his life forever. Breakfast with the Dirt Cult chronicles the days of love and war in the life of Tom Walton. Torn between a beautiful, bibliophilic, Canadian ex-stripper and the hunt for Al-Qaeda in the mountains of Afghanistan, Walton finds himself forced to grapple with being a young man in the days of modernity. While Breakfast with the Dirt Cult has been written as a novel, it is based on a true story. The names have been changed and the chronology has been condensed for the sake of editing.

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 : Vicky Pattison
Publisher : Sphere
ISBN 13 : 0751557013
Total Pages : 163 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Nothing But the Truth written by Vicky Pattison and published by Sphere. This book was released on 2014-08-14 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CHECK OUT THE NEW AND UPDATED EDITION, OUT ON 3RD MARCH! (9780751565447) Vicky Pattison always had big dreams, but four years ago she was working in a call centre in Newcastle and those dreams looked like they might never come true. Could a new reality series, Geordie Shore, be the big break she had been waiting for? Chosen from among thousands of hopefuls to take part in the controversial show, outspoken and outrageous Vicky was an immediate hit. Finally she was on her way to becoming a star . . . Living your life on screen isn't always easy, however, and Vicky soon found herself struggling to cope: her relationship was toxic, her weight ballooning and her self-esteem in tatters. It looked like the glamorous and confident Vicky Pattison everyone knew was gone for good. But you can't keep a good Geordie girl down and now Vicky will reveal how she has turned her life around and come out fighting. Now updated to include all the latest drama from the Geordie Shore house - including Vicky's shock departure - and her exciting plans for the future. It's time for Vicky Pattison to tell the truth, the whole truth and NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH.