Following the success of S is for Sunflower: A Kansas Alphabet, husbandand- wife author team Devin and Corey Scillian join illustrator Doug Bowles in another rousing state tribute. One Kansas Farmer: A Kansas Number Book "counts out" an entertaining and educational travelogue of the state's history, geography, famous people, and places. Topics include the dancing prairie chickens and the invention of the microchip. Corey and Devin Scillian are graduates of the University of Kansas. They now live in Michigan where Devin anchors the news for WDIV-TV in Detroit. Devin's other children's books include the bestselling A is for America: An American Alphabet and Brewster the Rooster. Doug Bowles enjoys working with a wide range of clients in advertising, corporate, and editorial jobs, as well as in the children's book market. He also enjoys working on fine art collections and shows frequently in galleries around Kansas. Doug lives in Leawood, Kansas.

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time From the Modern Library’s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by Truman Capote—also available are Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Other Voices, Other Rooms (in one volume), Portraits and Observations, and The Complete Stories Truman Capote’s masterpiece, In Cold Blood, created a sensation when it was first published, serially, in The New Yorker in 1965. The intensively researched, atmospheric narrative of the lives of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, and of the two men, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, who brutally killed them on the night of November 15, 1959, is the seminal work of the “new journalism.” Perry Smith is one of the great dark characters of American literature, full of contradictory emotions. “I thought he was a very nice gentleman,” he says of Herb Clutter. “Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.” Told in chapters that alternate between the Clutter household and the approach of Smith and Hickock in their black Chevrolet, then between the investigation of the case and the killers’ flight, Capote’s account is so detailed that the reader comes to feel almost like a participant in the events.

2019 Midwest Book Award for Nature 2020 High Plains Book Award Finalist 2020 Silver Nautilus Book Award Winner in Green Living and Sustainability “Sustainable” has long been the rallying cry of agricultural progressives; given that much of our nation’s farm and ranch land is already degraded, however, sustainable agriculture often means maintaining a less-than-ideal status quo. Industrial agriculture has also co-opted the term for marketing purposes without implementing better practices. Stephanie Anderson argues that in order to provide nutrient-rich food and fight climate change, we need to move beyond sustainable to regenerative agriculture, a practice that is highly tailored to local environments and renews resources. In One Size Fits None Anderson follows diverse farmers across the United States: a South Dakota bison rancher who provides an alternative to the industrial feedlot; an organic vegetable farmer in Florida who harvests microgreens; a New Mexico super-small farmer who revitalizes communities; and a North Dakota midsize farmer who combines livestock and grain farming to convert expensive farmland back to native prairie. The use of these nontraditional agricultural techniques show how varied operations can give back to the earth rather than degrade it. This book will resonate with anyone concerned about the future of food in America, providing guidance for creating a better, regenerative agricultural future. Download a discussion guide (PDF).

What began as bedtime stories for my five children about when I was a kid turned into One More Clean Shirt. This tale is based on actual accounts of a young farm boy in rural Kansas in the 1970s. You will catch yourself chuckling to even laughing out loud while experiencing life on a rural Kansas farm through the young eyes and heart of Little Joe. From corncob fights to horse trading, these funny, sad, and life-changing events will appeal to readers young and old.

Arnold Bauer grew up on his family's 160-acre farm in Goshen Township in Clay County, Kansas, amidst a land of prairie grass and rich creek-bottom soil. His meditative and moving account of those years depicts a century-long narrative of struggle, survival, and demise. A coming-of-age memoir set in the 1930s to 50s, it blends local history with personal reflection to paint a realistic picture of farm life and families from a now-lost world. Bauer's was typical of true family farms, where wives supplemented family income by selling butter and eggs and children provided unpaid labor. These hardworking farmers were not particularly heroic or virtuous. They had their debts and doubts; but at the same time their struggles for a kind of moral economy offer valuable lessons that merit our attention today. Among Bauer's vivid recollections: driving a team of huge, clomping work horses; his father's daybreak call to long days in the field at age 12; and surviving eight years of education in a one-room schoolhouse (with one teacher determined to have all her students learn the harmonica). He shares the trials of Depression and drought, experiences the coming of electricity-which prompted his father to take on a sideline as an electrician-and reveals the vital importance of the local blacksmith. Throughout the book, he finds wonder in the commonplace, like going to town on a Saturday night for a black walnut ice cream cone. Here is a childhood that few in the United States will ever know. More than that, it is a key to understanding the tragedy that befell the smaller family farms on the Great Plains as sweeping changes after the mid-1950s-falling grain and livestock prices, adverse terms of trade for agricultural products-turned out to be more devastating than tornados or dust storms. Gracefully written with a keen eye for the telling detail, Time's Shadow eloquently captures the events of an era and the meaning it held for one boy and those around him. It is a refreshingly unsentimental "Little House on the Prairie" that will resonate not only with older compatriots but with anyone whose curiosity leads them to wonder about a world we have lost.

In her magical, memorable novel, Sandra Dallas explores the ties of loyalty and friendship that unite the women in a quilting circle in Depression-era Kansas It is the 1930s, and hard times have hit Harveyville, Kansas, where the crops are burning up, and there's not a job to be found. For Queenie Bean, a young farm wife, a highlight of each week is the gathering of the Persian Pickle Club, a group of local ladies dedicated to improving their minds, exchanging gossip, and putting their quilting skills to good use. When a new member of the club stirs up a dark secret, the women must band together to support and protect one another.

This is a powerful original account of one man's efforts to raise wheat on his farm in Meade County, Kansas, during the 1930s. Lawrence Svobida tells of farmers "fighting in the front-line trenches, putting in crop after crop, year after year, only to see each crop in turn destroyed by the elements." Although not a writer by trade, Svobida undertook to record what he saw and experienced "to help the reader to understand what is taking place in the Great Plains region, and how serious it is." He wrote of the need for better farming methods--the only way, he felt, the destruction could be halted or confined. Well before the principles of an ecological movement were widely embraced, Svobida urged a public acceptance of the "sovereign rights of the states and the nation to regulate the use of land by owners . . .so that it may be conserved as a national resource." This graphic account of farm life in the Dust Bowl—perhaps the only autobiographical record of Dust Bowl agriculture in existence—was first published in 1941. This new edition contains an introduction by the historian R. Douglas Hurt that not only objectively sets the scene during and after the Dust bowl, but also places the book properly in the growing body of contemporary literature on agriculture and land use. The volume is an important contribution to American agricultural history in general, and the the history of the Depression and of the Great Plains in particular.

This book has no scholarly paraphernalia at all--a departure for the author of the meticulously researched, Pulitzer Prize-winning history The Making of the atomic bomb. The narrative is based on detailed notes Rhodes kept in 42 special notebooks during a year he spent visiting and working on a family farm in central Missouri. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

An epic story of the American wheat harvest, the politics of food, and the culture of the Great Plains For over one hundred years, the Mockett family has owned a seven-thousand-acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s father was raised. Mockett, who grew up in bohemian Carmel, California, with her father and her Japanese mother, knew little about farming when she inherited this land. Her father had all but forsworn it. In American Harvest, Mockett accompanies a group of evangelical Christian wheat harvesters through the heartland at the invitation of Eric Wolgemuth, the conservative farmer who has cut her family’s fields for decades. As Mockett follows Wolgemuth’s crew on the trail of ripening wheat from Texas to Idaho, they contemplate what Wolgemuth refers to as “the divide,” inadvertently peeling back layers of the American story to expose its contradictions and unhealed wounds. She joins the crew in the fields, attends church, and struggles to adapt to the rhythms of rural life, all the while continually reminded of her own status as a person who signals “not white,” but who people she encounters can’t quite categorize. American Harvest is an extraordinary evocation of the land and a thoughtful exploration of ingrained beliefs, from evangelical skepticism of evolution to cosmopolitan assumptions about food production and farming. With exquisite lyricism and humanity, this astonishing book attempts to reconcile competing versions of our national story.

A memoir of love and reckoning. A story of love, family, and the fight to keep the great plains from running dry. Julene Bair has inherited part of a farming empire and fallen in love with a rancher from Kansas's beautiful Smoky Valley. She means to create a family, provide her son with the father he longs for, and preserve the Bair farm for the next generation, honoring her own father's wish and commandment, 'Hang on to your land!' But part of her legacy is a share of the ecological harm the Bair Farm has done: each growing season her family--like other irrigators--pumps over two hundred million gallons out of the Ogallala aquifer. The rapidly disappearing aquifer is the sole source of water on the vast western plains, and her family's role in its depletion haunts her. As traditional ways of life collide with industrial realities, Bair must dramatically change course.