Lee Klancher: The Farmall Century 1923-2023

The Farmall Century 1923-2023: The Evolution of Red Tractors and Crawlers in the Golden Age of International Harvester – Lee Klancher – Octane Press – Hardcover – 9781642341393 – 384 pages (11.8 x 10.5) – $59.95 – October 26, 2023

This fantastic coffee table book is a massive, well-researched, detailed, extensively illustrated, and very readable history not only of the International Harvester Farmall tractor, but of the people and company that built, marketed and sold it all over the world. Even if you have no interest whatsoever in tractors as motorized, wheeled devices, this story is compelling. Farming was once what the majority of Americans did for a living, and while the numbers of farmers has declined steadily during the last hundred years, the industries that emerged in the industrial age to convert American agriculture from horse to engine driven agriculture were a crucial part of the story of modern America and the world we fed (and still, to some measure still feed).

As a history of an important part of our agro-industrial economy, The Farmall Century is indispensable. If you are interested in American history, this book will captivate your imagination and make you think about the incredible ambition, ingenuity, inventiveness, and commitment of so many individuals who built these industrial companies, and you will also find reasons to think about the downsides of our industrialized agriculture too.

Lee Klancher probably knows more about tractors and farmers than anyone you will ever come across. He not only writes and takes photographs for his books, he is also the founder and operator of the leading tractor related book publisher, Octane Press, in Austin, Texas. I interviewed him about Octane for the Publishing Talks series back in 2016 because I think the kind of focused niche publishing he does is so interesting.

In any case, I love anything with wheels, and even though I did not grow up on a farm and have never driven a tractor, I had a great time reading Lee’s beautifully written and produced Farmall book. Talking to Lee about it was an additional pleasure. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. Here’s a link to the book, and here’s a link to Octane Press, which is a fun site to visit also. There are plenty of tractor books there, but much more too, a great many treats, especially if you like wheeled vehicles.

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Crooked Hallelujah: Kelli Jo Ford

Crooked Hallelujah – Kelli Jo Ford – 978-0-8021-4912-1 – Grove Press – Hardcover – 304 pages – July 14, 2020 – $26.00 – ebook versions available at lower prices.

Kelli Jo Ford’s novel is a deeply rewarding read. Comparisons to the work of Louise Erdrich are inevitable and unavoidable (and Kelli Jo mentioned Louise in our conversation as one of her most important influences.) This is a novel of relationships and family told through the voices of four generations of Cherokee women and to a lesser extent, the men who come in and out of their lives. The narrative weaves together strands of familial cloth into what emerges as a beautiful and compelling pattern that we experience fully as the story is told.

At the outset of the book, we are in 1974 in the Cherokee Nation, eastern Oklahoma, where fifteen-year-old Justine is growing up in a family dominated by women – her mother, Lula, and her mother’s mother, Granny. We follow Justine, and her daughter, Reney, through a series of challenges in Oklahoma and Texas and back to Oklahoma, where family and roots call out to her.

Kelli Jo Ford is a fine writer, and manages her characters and their stories well. Her intergenerational story is complicated, and the multiple narrative voices take some concentration to follow, but her writing is warm and deft, and we are rewarded in the end by the beauty and depth of her characters and their lives. This family of strong Cherokee women continually face challenges with strength and wisdom. They make the necessary sacrifices for the people in their lives and go on living despite all the difficulties they face. They don’t always get along – these women are real people, not caricatures. They do not always succeed in understanding each other or overcoming the difficulties and challenges they face. There are conflicts over religion and individuality. But these women are bound by blood, heart, and a deeply felt love that carries them forward despite all. I came away from this book with an appreciation for the strength and perceptiveness of Cherokee women.

Kelli Jo Ford is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. She is the recipient of numerous awards, a National Artist Fellowship by the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and a Dobie Paisano Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, and the anthology Forty Stories: New Writing published by Harper in 2012. She now lives in Virginia with her husband, poet Scott Weaver.

My conversation with Kelli Jo was her first interview about Crooked Hallelujah. She is a new writer many of us will want to follow in the years to come.

Author website here.

Support local business. Buy the book from R.J. Julia Booksellers.

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Gregory McNamee: Tortillas, Tiswin & T-Bones: A Food History of the Southwest

Tortillas, Tiswin & T-Bones: A Food History of the Southwest – Gregory McNamee – University of New Mexico Press – 256 pages – paperback – 9780826359049 – $24.95 – October 30, 2017 – ebook versions available.

According to the publisher, this book is an “entertaining history [of] the many ethnic and cultural traditions that have contributed to the food of the Southwest.” And while I do agree that the book’s style makes it a relatively compelling and easy book to read, I think its author, Greg McNamee, is trying to do much more than entertain. McNamee uses food and cooking as a lens to understanding culture, yes, but also to pinpointing the issues that face us in America as we try to grapple with climate change, to live reasonably and sustainably on the earth, and to work together with our fellow humans. There is no heavy handedness to his approach, but he never lets us forget the driving themes of his work, and his perspective.

McNamee starts off by going back to the earliest periods when humans arrived in the Americas, and takes us through the beginning of agriculture in Mesoamerica, and the ancient trade networks that evolved to connect peoples of the coasts, plains, and mountains. From there, he takes us through the various areas that comprise the loosely labelled southwestern region of America, up through the present day’s fusion of cultures and foodways from so many different areas that defines this cuisine now.

Covering just about everything edible in human cultures in what we consider to be the southwest region (which he defines a bit more broadly than most), from chili pepper and agave, to modern day cuisines that include Frito pie and other cross cultural inventions, McNamee traces a culinary journey through varieties of space and time, to get us where we are today and significantly, what the southwest and its food and people might look like in our emerging future.

Tortillas, Tiswin & T-Bones is indeed, a masterful work of accessible anthropology that was recognized as one of the 2017 Southwest Books of the Year. Since I love the southwest and its food, reading this book was a great pleasure for me.

Greg McNamee is a writer, journalist, editor, photographer, and publisher. He is the author or editor of forty books and more than five thousand periodical contributions. He operates Sonora Wordworks, an editorial and publishing service, and is also the publisher of Polytropos Press.

McNamee is a research associate at the Southwest Center of the University of Arizona, and a lecturer in U of A’s Economics Department of the Eller College of Management. Additionally, he teaches courses and gives talks on writing, publishing, journalism, media and technology, as well as cultural and environmental issues. He lives in southern Arizona. Learn more about him and his work at his website.

It was a pleasure for me to get to speak with Greg, who is a great storyteller and conversationalist, and a I only wish we had been able to speak in person, and for a much longer period of time. And I was very pleased to learn how to pronounce “tiswin” too.

This book feels like sitting down to a dinner with Diana Kennedy and Jim Harrison, tequila in hand and great conversation going long into the night. It’s alive, a love story, a timeless journey. I absolutely loved reading it and will treasure Gregory McNamee’s words for a long time to come.

— Tracey Ryder, cofounder of Edible Communities and coauthor of Edible: A Celebration of Local Foods

Tortillas, Tiswin, and T-Bones sends the reader on a riveting adventure, tracking the origins of Southwestern ingredients and culture to reveal American history through food. McNamee’s prose is deft and authoritative, and this is a highly original, timely book.

—Kate Christensen, author of Blue Plate Special and How to Cook a Moose

 

 

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Philipp Meyer: The Son

978-0062120397 – Ecco Press – Hardcover – $27.99 (ebook editions available at lower prices)

It is wonderful these days to come across a novel with big ambitions.  It is even better to come across one that succeeds so brilliantly as The Son, which is only the second novel by Philipp Meyer.  His first book, American Rust, was published in 2009.

The Son is rooted in Texas, which gives Meyer the chance to be epic, as the place itself, so large and so much a part of the romantic history of the American West, enables story telling on a grand scale.  There are three generations of stories in the novel, told in three separate voices, all of members of the same family, living out the story of European America.  It’s a terrific story, complicated and sometimes challenging to keep straight whose voice you are hearing, which period you are in, but I was hooked from the outset of the book and could not put it down.  Admittedly, I am a sucker for stories that show American Indians as real people, not as stick figures, and which admit (and celebrate) the complexity of human beings rather than trying to judge them from the perspective of the present.

Meyer is a terrific writer throughout. To be this good so early in his career may put alot of pressure on him going forward.  It is difficult for any writer to continually come up with great stories and tell them well.  Talking to Meyer here about his work, and about how he came to write The Son, I gained a good deal of respect for this writer and his literary vision.  The next book I am reading this summer is American Rust and I am going to be looking forward to Meyer’s next book, which I hope to be reading in the not too distant future.  Philipp Meyer is the real deal, a great writer telling stories of America that help is define who we are in this late era of the American Empire. 

*Note to listeners – Meyer and I had an unusually long conversation, this interview runs a bit more than 42 minutes, I hope well worth your while to hear all the way through.

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David Morrell – The Shimmer

978-1593155377 – Hardcover

Vanguard Press  $25.95

David Morrell is one of the better action thriller novelists writing today.  Not only does he write well, but his novels always have terrific characters, explore complex emotional relationships, and are driven by great story telling.  When I picked up The Shimmer, I already had a number of other books on my plate and no real intention of reading it right away.  But after the first few pages I could not put it down.  This wonderful novel combines elements of the thriller novel with science fiction and fantasy, historical fiction, modern psychological horror stories.  My interview with the interesting and voluble David Morrell gives readers a chance to get to know quite a bit about this novel, his 28th, and much more about his background as a writer, a teacher and storyteller.  The Shimmer takes place in a town in Texas modeled closely on the real-life town of Marfa and includes a great deal of real history woven into a gripping modern tale.  This book is a great example of Morrell’s work, and this interview was a lot of fun for me to do. — David Wilk

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