DOWN ON THE FARM: A Picture Treasury of Country Life in America in the Good Old Days

This can only be half a report- and, from the sales viewpoint, not the better half. For this is a picture treasury and we have only the text. But the text starts the imagination working, and one can imagine, from the connecting links and the captions, what a wealth of nostalgic value the photographs, the contemporary prints, the reproductions of advertisements, etc. will contribute. Holbrook, steeped as he is in the lore and the background of what has gone into the making of this country, draws not only on that background, but on his own range of personal experience,- from the Vermont of his boyhood to the Northwest of his maturity. He writes of the individuality of farms, from the potato farm in Maine to the stump ranch in Washington State, from cotton fields of Georgia to wheat ranches in Minnesota. Soil, climate, market- all go to determine the type. Then there's a section on remembered moments, another on the labor of a farm; there's a section on the animal life, on produce -- as farms changed from self sufficiency to use of cooperative services. Work and play, transportation, schools, church and town meetings -- all add to the overall picture of farm life of the American past. While there's a forward look in the suggestions of shift to power machinery, most of the sum and substance deals with the past. Pick your customer for a good gift item, And for libraries, this is good documentary Americana.