From Booklist
In the 31-year-old black-and-white photographs that are the meat of this book, Berry and two of his children, along with many others, help a neighbor bring in his yearly crop of burley tobacco, prized for the production of cigarettes. The crop must be cut at the plants' stalks, carefully stacked on wagons for hauling to the tobacco barn, and then hung from beams near the top of the barn. In Kentucky in late August and early September, this is hot work that must be done with dispatch because of tobacco's relative delicateness. Berry explains in the introductory essay that the work begins as solitary for each cutter, becoming somewhat sociable as the crop is stacked, and more sociable, with joke telling, as the big leaves are housed in the barn. Medical and economic developments conspired to make these pictures taken by Berry's longtime friend Hall the record of work that is now practically extinct in the U.S. but that Berry honors for neighborliness and good fellowship. Superb Americana. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Ed McClanahan
"An invaluable historical record and a consummate work of art."


Book Description
In 1973 James Baker Hall photographed…these scenes and events of a Kentucky tobacco harvest. We look at them now with a sort of wonder, and with some regret, realizing that while our work was going on, powerful forces were at play that would change the scene and make "history" of those lived days, which were enriched for us then by their resemblance to earlier days and to days that presumably were to follow.—Wendell Berry, from the book An insightful meditation on the shifting nature of humans’ relationships with the land and with each other, Berry’s essay laments the economic, political, and societal changes that have forever altered Kentucky’s rich agricultural traditions. Berry also adds a deeply personal perspective to Hall’s eloquent visual testimony. With a farm of his own nearby, Berry was a longtime friend and neighbor of the families shown in Hall’s pictures and took part in their work swapping. In addition to detailing the repetitive, strenuous labor involved in harvesting a tobacco crop, he relates memories of stories told, laughs shared, meals savored, and brief moments of rest and refreshment well earned. Hall’s striking photographs illuminate the characters and events that Berry describes. During the 1973 harvest, he photographed the rows stretching toward the horizon while laborers cut a tobacco crop, one plant at a time, until the last row was cut, hauled, and housed in the barn. These photographs powerfully convey the physical experiences of a Kentucky tobacco harvest: the heat of the sun, the dirt, and the people hard at work.


About the Author
James Baker Hall, former Kentucky Poet Laureate, is the author of many books. Wendell Berry is a poet, a novelist, a farmer, a conservationist, and a former professor of English. His books include The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, Jayber Crow, and Two More Stories of the Port William Membership, and Life is a Miracle: An Essay against Modern Superstition.

FROM THE PUBLISHER