Pastoral Song, James Rebanks
Pastoral Song, James Rebanks
6 Rating(s)
List: $26.99 | Sale: $18.89
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Pastoral Song

Author: James Rebanks

Narrator: Peter Noble

Unabridged: 8 hr 35 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 08/03/2021


Synopsis

The acclaimed chronicle of the regeneration of one family's traditional English farmNATIONAL BESTSELLER * Winner of the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing * Named ""Nature Book of the Year"" by the Sunday Times * New York Times Editors' Choice * Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize * A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Sunday Times, Financial Times, New Statesman, Independent, Telegraph, Observer, and Daily Mail""Superbly written and deeply insightful, the book captivates the reader until the journey’s end.” — Wall Street JournalThe New York Times bestselling author of The Shepherd’s Life profiles his family’s farm across three generations, revealing through this intimate lens the profound global transformation of agriculture and of the human relationship to the land.As a boy, James Rebanks's grandfather taught him to work the land the old way. Their family farm in England's Lake District hills was part of an ancient agricultural landscape: a patchwork of crops and meadows, of pastures grazed with livestock, and hedgerows teeming with wildlife. And yet, by the time James inherited the farm, it was barely recognizable. The men and women had vanished from the fields; the old stone barns had crumbled; the skies had emptied of birds and their wind-blown song.Hailed as ""a brilliant, beautiful book"" by the Sunday Times (London), Pastoral Song (published in the United Kingdom under the title English Pastoral) is the story of an inheritance: one that affects us all. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost. And yet this elegy from the northern fells is also a song of hope: of how, guided by the past, one farmer began to salvage a tiny corner of England that was now his, doing his best to restore the life that had vanished and to leave a legacy for the future.This is a book about what it means to have love and pride in a place, and how, against all the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all.[Published in the United Kingdom as English Pastoral.]

About James Rebanks

James Rebanks is a farmer based in the Lake District, where his family have lived and worked for over six hundred years. A graduate of Oxford University, James is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Shepherd’s Life, and Pastoral Song.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Ceecee on August 25, 2020

James Rebanks family has been farming in the Eden Valley in Cumbria for many years. He learned his craft particularly from his grandfather whose methods of framing owed much to the past. His own father stood on the cusp of the old and the new economical and industrial framing which caused him a grea......more

Goodreads review by JimZ on September 28, 2021

A very fine book. An engrossing read. The memoir is divided into three parts. Reading the first part I lost sense of time. It was so enjoyable and so interesting to read. Being a city boy all my life, I was fascinated about life on the farm. Not an easy life to be sure. There were many accolades fro......more

Goodreads review by Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer on January 25, 2022

Our land is like a poem, in a patchwork landscape of other poems, written by hundreds of people, both those here now and the many hundreds that came before us, with each generation adding new layers of meaning and experience. And the poem, if you can read it, tells a complex truth. It has both mo......more

Goodreads review by Tom on March 25, 2021

Our response to ecological collapse may prove to be the defining legacy of our generation, one way or the other. Many well-meaning, largely urban and middle class people have taken to the streets in the name of the planet in recent years. But waving placards and climbing on top of trains when someth......more