Book Reviews

Independent Criticism

Winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Award for Non-Fiction 1996

"Hanson's memoir, informed by almost three thousand years of Western history, is passionate, confrontational, and bracingly apocalyptic. As the era of the family farm ends, perhaps it is true that a certain strain of rural literature where life and death are at issue and drama are hardly mitigated by culture, is also ending. If so, FIELDS WITHOUT DREAMS is a fitting valedictory work …[Hanson] writes like a Greek, with hubris, pursuit by Furies, fate, and tragic irony in full measure…. He's a writer as much as a farmer. His memoir is complex—passionate, angry, honest, scorching…. The book deserves a wide audience. His tale is suspenseful, even though the outcome, as in a tragedy, is a foregone conclusion. He's a good storyteller and a complex man, and his Greek-inspired rhetoric is a bracing departure from the agronomy-speak that has eviscerated discussion of these issues."—Jane Smiley, The New Yorker