Pastoral Song: A Farmer's Journey

US: Mariner Books, 2022. Paperback. Good. The acclaimed chronicle of the regeneration of one family's traditional Eng lish farm NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Winner of the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing * N amed "Nature Book of the Year" by the Sunday Times * New York Times Editors ' Choice * Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Royal Society of Litera ture's Ondaatje Prize * A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Sunday Times, Financial Ti mes, New Statesman, Independent, Telegraph, Observer, and Daily Mail "Superbly written and deeply insightful, the book captivates the reader unt il the journey's end." -- Wall Street Journal The New York Times bestselling author of The Shepherd's Life profileshis f amily's farm across three generations, revealing through this intimate lens the profound global transformation of agriculture and of the human relatio nship to the land. As a boy, James Rebanks's grandfather taught him to work the land the old w ay. Their family farm in England's Lake District hills was part of an ancie nt agricultural landscape: a patchwork of crops and meadows, of pastures gr azed with livestock, and hedgerows teeming with wildlife. And yet, by the t ime 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, we.