About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherUniversity of New Mexico Press

ISBN-100826328571

ISBN-139780826328571

eBay Product ID (ePID)2324599

Product Key Features

Book TitleRiver in Winter : New and Selected Essays

Number of Pages180 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year2003

TopicCustoms & Traditions, Essays, Sociology / Rural

IllustratorYes

GenreSocial Science, Literary Collections

AuthorStanley Crawford

FormatHardcover

Dimensions

Item Height0.7 in

Item Weight0 Oz

Item Length8.9 in

Item Width5.8 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

LCCN2002-152216

TitleLeadingThe

Dewey Edition21

Dewey Decimal978.9

SynopsisCrawford's thoughtful and witty essays explore his experiences as a farmer, activist, and observer in rural New Mexico. In his third nonfiction book he writes, among other topics, about the river which irrigates his land and the animals and plants which touch his life., This book is like Stanley Crawford's floor. The floor began more than thirty years ago when Crawford moved his family to New Mexico after selling movie rights to his first novel. The history of their home-made house is written in the hand-plastered floor, patched and sealed over the years. At first a reminder of how little he and his wife knew about working with mud, the floor has become beautiful in the years since 1971. It embodies their lives, the ways things have changed and the ways things have stayed the same. "A mud floor is perfectly sustainable, being infinitely repairable and finally recyclable." "Reflections in Mud," Crawford's essay about the floor, is one of the many pieces collected in this book about his life in northern New Mexico. The novelist who didn't know how to lay a mud floor is now a seasoned farmer, irrigator, and northern New Mexico villager, and the essays on these subjects that he has been writing since the 1980s continue the work he began in Mayordomo and A Garlic Testament as an articulator of values that are out of synch and out of scale with the suburban lives of most Americans in the twenty-first century. Whether he is writing about the river whose water irrigates his land, the plants and animals with which he lives, or the continuing struggle he and his neighbors must engage in if their small farms and farmers markets are to survive, Crawford's thoughtful, witty essays are the kinds of summing up that his fans have been cutting out of periodicals for years. Now that they are in book form we can all throw away the clippings, reread the essays, and give the book to friends who have yet to discover the pleasure of reading Stanley Crawford.

LC Classification NumberF801.2.C73 2003