Farm Memoir

The youngest of her parents’ combined 21 children, Sarah Frey grew up on a struggling farm in southern Illinois, often having to grow, catch, or hunt her own dinner alongside her brothers. She spent much of her early childhood dreaming of running away to the big city - or really anywhere with central heating. At 15, she moved out of her family home and started her own fresh produce delivery business with nothing more than an old pickup truck. Two years later, when the family farm faced inevitable foreclosure, Frey gave up on her dreams of escape and took over the farm.

Celebrated journalist Lauren St. John "bears witness to a remarkable story" ( Publishers Weekly) in this striking memoir of her African childhood. In the 1970s St. John lived on a Rhodesian farm that should have been paradise. But the specter of war hung over the land, filling every day with peril and uncertainty.

A Call to Duty The greatest conflict in human history started brothers Ray F. and John B. Lewis on a journey that they never imagined as farm boys picking cotton in the dusty fields of West Texas during the Great Depression. World War II took them across the Atlantic to places they had only read about in books or seen on movie screens when they could afford theater tickets. By the time they returned to the States, they had lost their country-boy naivete. In To War and Back: The World War II Journey of Two West Texas Farm Boys, award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction Preston Lewis ...

Raised in a primitive one-room farmhouse with no indoor plumbing, the fourth of five children, Catherine Marenghi begins her life in poverty and isolation. She leaves home at the age of 17. A decade later, she is a successful journalist with the means to buy her family their first decent house. But the past will not be put to rest so easily. Catherine unravels a web of long-buried family secrets, and a terrible betrayal that robbed her family of the home that was rightfully theirs. And she finally uncovers the story her parents never shared: the gladiolus farm that was once their dream.

When Gene was twenty-two, he left the family farm to pursue a career in corporate America. For the next 30 plus years, he developed his business and leadership acumen, often thinking and acting as if his father was standing at his side. However, the people were always the key, just as his father had taught him. Then in a tragic five-month period, his entire family passed away. When cleaning out his parent's home, he noticed his dad's well-worn "go to town" bib overalls and boots. Gene put on the bibs and boots, looking for anything feel-good to show his cousins how much he matched his dad's...

A touching memoir filled with food, friendships, and scenes of Italy, Pinch Me is ultimately a celebration of love, of learning to see the world, as well as oneself, through a different window, and of the powerful joy that comes from building a dream.

I discover a "lost" aunt, separated from our family due to racism and discrimination against the disabled. She had a mental disability due to childhood meningitis. She was taken away in 1942 when all Japanese Americans were considered the enemy and imprisoned. She then became a "ward" of the state. We believed she had died but 70 years later found her alive and living a few miles from our family farm. How did she survive? Why was she kept hidden? How did both shame and resilience empower my family to forge forward in a land that did not want them?

Another Slice of Paradise is my second book portraying life on our rustic riverside farm in the Portuguese mountains. Join us as we start offering riding holidays and begin to realise the traumas involved in trying to accomodate guests with a variety of different riding levels and dietary expectations! I promise that you will meet some very colourful characters! Our amazing horses, dogs, cats, ducks and chickens entwine themselves into our story, and our bemused Portuguese neighbours continue to try to educate us into the ways of local village life as we aim to become more self sufficient. ...

Belle Gunness was a farmer, a mother, and a murderer who lured victims to her Indiana farm with promises of love and opportunity. But behind the idyllic rural façade lay a gruesome reality—a farm where dreams were shattered, lives were stolen, and secrets were buried. Dubbed the "Black Widow of La Porte," Belle’s chilling crimes have haunted history for over a century. Whispers from the Murder Farm peels back the layers of this twisted case, exploring Belle’s calculated methods, the psychology behind her crimes, and the failures of law enforcement that allowed her to evade justice.

A Son of the Middle Border is an epic story of the quest for new frontiers during the last half of the nineteenth century, and of the gradual, heartbreaking failure of America's pioneer ideal.

Jimmy's Farm turns 20 years old in 2022. From starting out with rare breed pigs and a farm shop, Jimmy and his wife, Michaela, have grown the business over the years and the farm is now licensed to operate as a wildlife park. Tales from Jimmy's Farm follows a year in the life of the farm. The narrative traces the seasons as Jimmy documents what it means to live on a farm and what each day holds for him, his wife and four young daughters, the land he is farming and the animals in his care.

Alexandra Morton has been called "the Jane Goodall of Canada" because of her passionate thirty-year fight to save British Columbia's wild salmon. Her account of that fight is both inspiring in its own right and a roadmap of resistance.

Born-and-raised Johns Island resident Lee Glover tells the story of the evolution of his home from a rural agrarian setting to a rapidly changing sea island of the Low Country. Traditionally, Johns Island produced millions of pounds of fresh produce that was shipped all across America every year. Each summer, migrants and workers of all description, and in numbers sometimes surpassing the island's total population, flocked to participate in the harvest.

From poverty to lucky in love, Belle found her happy ending with a man named Mads…or so everyone thought. But when the wealthy Mads died a mysterious death, Belle collected the life insurance policy and remarried…only for her new husband to drop dead. With things going from strange to sinister, more men mysteriously die or go missing around Belle.

God is good, all the time. Jim Wilson was born in 1927 and raised in a Depression-era farming family. At the age of 16, at the height of World War II, he became the primary breadwinner for his parents and four younger siblings. At age 17, eager to fight for his country, he enlisted in the Navy. Germany surrendered while he was in the recruiting office, and the war was over by the time he entered boot camp. But God had a plan for Jim Wilson in the US Navy.

Calming, thought-provoking, poetic and honest, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm is a collection of writing and musing by documentary-maker, environmentalist and author of Waterlog Roger Deakin. For the last six years of his life, Roger Deakin kept notebooks. In them, he wrote his daily thoughts, feelings and observations about and around his Suffolk home, Walnut Tree Farm. Collected here are the very best of these writings, capturing his extraordinary, restless curiosity about nature as well as his impressions of our changing world.

It’s the summer of 2005, and Mardi Jo Link’s dream of living the simple life has unraveled into debt, heartbreak, and perpetually ragged cuticles. She and her husband of nineteen years have just called it quits, leaving her with serious cash-flow problems and a looming divorce. More broke than ever, Link makes a seemingly impossible resolution: to hang on to her century-old farmhouse in northern Michigan and continue to raise her three boys on well water and wood chopping and dirt. Armed with an unfailing sense of humor and three resolute accomplices, Link confronts blizzards and foxes, learns about Zen divorce and the best way to butcher a hog, dominates a zucchini-growing contest and wins a year’s supply of local bread, masters the art of bargain cooking, wrangles rampaging poultry, and withstands any blow to her pride in order to preserve the life she wants.

We are the sum of those people we’ve met along the way mixing with our DNA directives. DNA is the keel by which all influences must obey. There’s no getting around that primordial ooze we call family. Call it pre-existing conditionals. This is my childhood journey offered to you as a muse. An affirmation. An awareness. A hope. A rope. A relatable tale I hope will find itself on your keep list. My childhood journey was hilarious. Some of which are funnier through the eyes of an adult. We will laugh together here. Let me share my recipe. For balance. And joy. And contentment. And ...

This audiobook is narrated by Max Armstrong, one of America's favorite farm broadcasters. Max traveled thousands of miles by air and ground to hear the stories of the men and women of the Heartland. Armed with endless curiosity and a winning personality, Max visited farmers and producers at their kitchen tables, tractors, and combines.

Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl delivers a treat as delicious as oatmeal cookies hot out of the oven - a memoir of a happy childhood. In charming and memorable vignettes, Carol Bodensteiner captures rural life in Middle America, in the middle of the 20th Century. Bodensteiner grew up on a family-owned dairy farm in the 1950s, a time when a family could make a good living on 180 acres.