by John Graves
The regional essayist lives and flourishes, and nowhere does he flourish more vigorously than in Texas. Graves works a poor farm near Fort Worth, eking out a living by writing some of the most sensible, genial prose west of the Mississippi. Author of the beautiful Goodbye to a River, he offers here a kind of sequel to his last book, Hard Scrabble—recounting more about his 20 years of quiet combat with the forces of nature. He tackles such everyday subjects as home repairs, fences, killing animals for food, growing grapes, making wine and collecting junk. His writing seems as natural as breathing. After the postwar years of plenty, when wastefulness was viewed as a national virtue, Graves says he has found that "our tenure in sinless Eden begins to seem less assured, and here and there among the fruit trees stand prophets calling themselves environmentalists, ecologists, post-industrialists, and other things, who assert loudly that there really is guilt after all. They cry out, these spoilsports, for a return to thriftiness on a grand scale..." (Knopf, $11.95)
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