November Book of the Month
Hit by a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn
By Catherine Friend
Details: Rural life, Humor, Agriculture
Publisher: Da Capo Press, 2008
“Every time you have livestock, you also have deadstock.” That warning comes across clearly in Friend’s account of starting a farm in Hit by a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn. She and her partner make a hasty decision to give up city life and “get back to the land.” While many others have made this switch, few have been able to write about the new life so vividly, and with such humor. Cathy and Melissa embark on a rural odyssey filled with sheep, goats, chicken, llamas, and a host of other natural disasters. Not surprisingly, farming isn’t all it is cracked up to be. The book serves as both a warning to would-be farmers, and a paean to pastoral living.
NOTE: Although Minnesota is not usually identified as part of the Great Plains, our borders are quite fluid, with over 50 different models of what counts as the Plains.
“I'm reading a book now that I ration out 10 pages a day because I'll feel bereft when it's gone: it's a memoir of two women who go into sheep farming in Minnesota and I just really like both of them. And it starts with them attending shepherd school and learning to assess the potency of a ram by holding his testicles. A book that starts with a woman reaching up between a ram's hind legs is a book close to my heart.”
—Garrison Keillor, New York Times Book Review
Past Great Plains Books of the Month:
American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains, Dan Flores
A Chorus of Cranes: The Cranes of North America and the World, Paul Johnsgard
Encounter on the Great Plains: Scandinavian Settlers and the Dispossession of Dakota Indians, 1890-1930, Karen Hansen
Wild Again: The Struggle to Save the Black-Footed Ferret, David Jachowski
A Warrior of the People: How Susan La Flesche Overcame Racial and Gender Inequality to Become America's First Indian Doctor, Joe Starita
Natives of a Dry Place: Stories of Dakota Before the Oil Boom, Richard Edwards
Towards a Prairie Atonement, Trevor Herriot
Walking the Llano, Shelley Armitage
Barnstorming the Prairie, Jason Weems
Homesteading the Plains, Richard Edwards, Rebecca Wingo, Jacob Friefeld
Nebraska Poetry: A Sesquicentennial Anthology 1867-2017, Edited by Daniel Simon
This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm, Ted Genoways
Grasses of the Great Plains, By James Stubbendieck, Stephan L. Hatch, Cheryl D. Dunn
The Personal History of Rachel DuPree, Ann Weisgarber
The Trans-Mississippi and International Expositions of 1898–1899: Art, Anthropology, and Popular Culture at the Fin de Siècle by Wendy Katz
Jewels of the Plains: Wildflowers of the Great Plains Grasslands and Hills by Claude Barr and James Locklear
Chemical Lands: Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America's Grasslands Since 1945 by David Vail
Converting the Rosebud: Catholic Mission and the Lakota, 1886-1916 by Harvey Markowitz
The Sea of Grass: A Family Tale from the American Heartland by Walter Echo-Hawk
Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser.
Great Plains Literature by Linda Ray Pratt
Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh
American Trinity: Jefferson, Custer, and the Spirit of the West by Larry Len Peterson
Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands by Brenden Rensink
Slavery on the Periphery: The Kansas-Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras by Kristen Epps
Visions of the Tallgrass: Prairie Photographs by Harvey Payne
Flood on the Tracks: Living, Dying, and the Nature of Disaster in the Elkhorn River Basin by Todd Kerstetter
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
kisiskâciwan: Indigenous Voices from Where the River Flows Swiftly by Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber
Pacing Dakota by Thomas Dean Isern
Theodore Roosevelt & Bison Restoration on the Great Plains by Keith Aune and Glenn Plumb
American Eclipse: A Nation’s Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World by David Baron
Sovereign Schools: How Shoshones and Arapahos Created a High School on the Wind River Reservation by Martha Louise Hipp