Book Reviews

Independent Criticism

"…astute, often bitterly funny."—The New York Times Book Review

"So detailed, so angry and funny, that it will surely find a lasting readership."—Bill McKibben, The New York Review of Books

"A vivid work that on the whole is more honest about people who live on the land than any of recent vintage. FIELDS WITHOUT DREAMS is a deadly serious book, but it is enormously entertaining as well."—The Weekly Standard

"[A] beautiful, combative elegy for the beleaguered family farmer…. FIELDS WITHOUT DREAMS is the best written, most shrewdly observed account of the farmer's world to appear in some time…. Hanson's voice is by turns scabrous and compassionate, as resolute in the depiction of villainy as it is heartbreakingly eloquent in its descriptions of physical labor and human virtue…. With this masterpiece of a book, we have, finally, an American Hesiod."—The Sunday Oregonian