Product Description

Despite beautiful landscapes and bountiful harvests, farming is hard work and always has been. The Great Depression in rural America, which began in the 1920s and lasted until World War II, made it still harder. At a time when tractors were replacing horses and the family farm was giving way to the large, single-crop enterprise, the struggle to survive and modernize in a period of economic scarcity was especially sharp. In A Good Day's Work, Dwight Hoover, who grew up on an Iowa farm in this era, recalls the events of day-to-day life on a single farm, offering detailed descriptions of daily work in each of the year's four seasons. A Good Day's Work is a fascinating if grim reminder of what it was like to be a child with adult responsibilities. Mr. Hoover's unusual memoir recalls the rough edges as well as the happy moments of rural life. It is an honest re-creation of a world that was vanishing.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #245808 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Review
"Richly detailed accounting of the ways of another time. A fine memoir." -- Indiana Magazine of History

"The classic family farming tale. ... A Good Day's Work provides a wealth of information that would otherwise be lost when the author's generation, which largely left agriculture through education and World War II, is gone." --Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Annals of Iowa, Spring-Summer 2008

"Will captivate anyone interested in agricultural history or in the way their grandparents lived." -- DARRELL SMITH, FarmJournal

"Hoover does an exemplary job of recreating a vanished world...a high quality book....a 'must read to enjoy' book." -- The Mahattan Mercury

"Poignant, personal and riveting in its warts-and-all recocollections of chorse, school and the everyday infrastructure of rural life." -- Neil Pond in American Profile

A delightful read....A poignant record of an agricultural age that will never return. -- R. Douglas Hurt, author of Problems of Plenty and American Farm

Absorbing picture of the skills and privation that went into the making of a person and a way of life. -- Gilbert Cranberg, former editor of the Des Moines Register

The most detailed and artful telling of family farming that I have ever read....A valuable contribution to agricultural history. -- Richard Quinney, author of Of Time and Place and Tales From the Middle Border

Review
"Four lyrical interspersed chapters in A Good Day's Work describe farm life during each season of the year."

Review
"I found that Hoover's book produced ... curiosity and longing to have experienced a real family farm. ... Anyone with an interest in history or farming or nostalgia would like Hoover's book."

Customer Reviews

An interesting farm history
A Good Day's Work Dwight W. Hoover

This book brought back many memories for me of visiting my older sister living on a farm in Indiana during the fifties. I also loved to hear my mother telling stories of growing up on a farm in Indiana in the early 1900's. There is much about farm life described by the author that is similar over these decades. He describes the hard work, the co-operation, family bond and the community spirit that seems to me to be a common thread throughout farm life. This book caused me to think about the family values and personal ethics that are less a part of our lives today as not only farming but other occupations have changed in the United States. The hard work, long days and financial uncertainty remain for those family farmers trying to continue the traditional way of farming in the mid-west. The author shares the right amount of antidotal stories that causes the reader to feel he/she knows this farm family. Sharing their experiences through the writing of one of the members of the Hoover family makes this book a joy to read.

A Good Day's Read
Although Mr. Hoover's book evoked no memories for me (I was born and raised in Chicago), I was completely absorbed and enchanted. He brings alive a different time and place so vividly that he carries his reader there with his descriptions and stories. Although he apparently means this book as a gift to his grandsons, it is equally a gift to all of us who can get lost in its pages!

An ok but not brilliant view of life on the farm
Dwight W. Hoover describes his boyhood on a 100-acre Iowa family farm in the 1930s. I grew up on a 100-acre dairy farm in Wisconsin a few years later, and to some extent his account resonated with me.

Our family, like his, tried and failed to come to grips with the "get big or get out" realities of American agriculture. The Iowa Highway Commission delivered a major blow with its decision to "construct a state highway through my father's farm," destroying the family's orchard.

Our family, like his, moved from horse power (mule power in our case) to tractors. It was important to grow more cash crops and re-fence to allow "full utilization of the tractor's potential." His chapter on the factors involved in this conversion is one of the most interesting and insightful of the entire book: the increase in the need for cash, changes in crops, the elimination of work stock, the arrangement of fences and fields, and the use of farm buildings.

He hated many of the farm chores: manure hauling, castration and the killing. But, "pumping water was no more boring than working out in a gym, and at least the exercise was outdoors in clean air." He writes with some pleasure of the 4-H and Future Farmers of America programs, and his competitions at the local fairs.

At the end of the day, he leaves farming as a teenager. There's a bit of regret in his telling of his story, but he clearly enjoyed his professor's life more. This is a useful book for anyone interested in the conversion from animal to tractor power on mid-western farms.

The "Wall Street Journal" reviewed this book with Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression (I purchased them both because of the coincidence of my own upbringing). Mildred Armstrong Kalish describes a warmer, perhaps happier culture, but the two books describe a similar life style. Perhaps, most revealing, both authors left the farm when they were able to do so as teenagers.

Robert C. Ross 2008