{"product_id":"9781477309353","title":"Hard Scrabble : Observations on a Patch of Land","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"A kind of homemade book-imperfect like a handmade thing, a prize. It's a galloping, spontaneous book, on occasion within whooping distance of that greatest and sweetest of country books, Ivan Turgenev's A Sportsman's Notebook.\" -Edward Hoagland, New York Times Book Review\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\"His subjects are trees and brush, hired help, fences, soil, armadillos and other wildlife, flood and drought, local history, sheep and goats . . . and they come to us reshaped and reenlivened by his agreeably individual (and sometimes cranky) notions.\" -New Yorker\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\"If Goodbye to a River was in some sense Graves's Odyssey, this book is his [version of Hesiod's] Works and Days. It is partly a book about work, partly a book about nature, but mostly a book about belonging. In the end John Graves has learned to belong to his patch of land so thoroughly that at moments he can sense in himself a unity with medieval peasants and Sumerian farmers, working with their fields by the Tigris.\" -Larry McMurtry, Washington Post Book World\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\"Hard Scrabble is hard pastoral of the kind we have learned to recognize in Wordsworth, Frost, Hemingway, and Faulkner. It celebrates life in accommodation with a piece of the 'given' creation, a recalcitrant four hundred or so acres of Texas cedar brake, old field, and creek bottom, which will require of any genuine resident all the character he can muster.\" -Southwest Review\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Texas Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45699997073487,"sku":"00000_00000_00000_00000","price":698.0,"currency_code":"TWD","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/kinokuniya.com.tw\/products\/9781477309353","provider":"Books Kinokuniya Taiwan","version":"1.0","type":"link"}