'Poignant ... A meditation on life, love and the importance of nature' IRISH TIMES Thirty-four years ago, when they were in their twenties, Niall Williams and Christine Breen made the impulsive decision to leave their lives in New York City and move to Christine's ancestral home in the town of Kiltumper in rural Ireland. In the decades that followed, the pair dedicated themselves to writing, gardening and living a life that followed the rhythms of the earth. In 2019, with Christine in the final stages of recovery from cancer and the land itself threatened by the arrival of turbines just one farm over, Niall and Christine decided to document a year of living in their garden and in their small corner of a rapidly changing world. Proceeding month by month through the year, this is the story of a garden in all its many splendours, and a couple who have made their life observing its wonders.

A SUNDAY TELEGRAPH AND GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR WINNER OF SWEDEN'S AUGUST PRIZE WINNER OF THE WARWICK PRIZE FOR WOMEN IN TRANSLATION SHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH ACADEMY BOOK PRIZE 'Osebol is a magnificent success; it is hard to imagine it better ... Kapla is a magician ... mesmerizing' Sara Wheeler, TLS 'A simple, pared-back and down-to-earth masterpiece' James Rebanks 'We listen to them like something caught on the wind ... so moving and so strangely beckoning' Nicci Gerrard, Observer '[Among] the year's most pleasing books' Rishi Dastidar, Guardian, Books of the Year 'Engrossing and humbling and quietly revelatory' Max Porter 'Fascinating ... I was riveted' Lydia Davis 'Like standing outside an open window on a warm summer evening and listening to a piece of contemporary history' Lanstidningen 'What a wonderful book . . . You want to move into it' Expressen Near the river Klaralven, snug in the dense forest landscape of northern Varmland, lies the secluded village of Osebol. It is a quiet place: one where relationships take root over decades, and where the bustle of city life is replaced by the sound of wind in the trees. In this extraordinary and engrossing book, an unexpected cultural phenomenon in its native Sweden, the stories of Osebol's residents are brought to life in their own words. Over the last half-century, the automation of the lumber industry and the steady relocations to the cities have seen the village's adult population fall to roughly forty. But still, life goes on; heirlooms are passed from hand to hand, and memories from mouth to mouth, while new arrivals come from near and far. Marit Kapla has interviewed nearly every villager between the ages of 18 and 92, recording their stories verbatim. What emerges is at once a familiar chronicle of great social metamorphosis, told from the inside, and a beautifully microcosmic portrait of a place and its people. To read Osebol is to lose oneself in its gentle rhythms of simple language and open space, and to emerge feeling like one has really grown to know the inhabitants of this varied community, nestled among the trees in a changing world.

You hear a lot these days about "innovation and entrepreneurship" and about how "good jobs" in tech will save our cities. Yet these common tropes hide a stunning reality: local lives and fortunes are tied to global capital. You see this clearly in metropolises such as San Francisco and New York that have emerged as "superstar cities." In these cities, startups bloom, jobs of the future multiply, and a meritocracy trained in digital technology, backed by investors who control deep pools of capital, forms a new class: the tech-financial elite. In The Innovation Complex, the eminent urbanist Sharon Zukin shows the way these forces shape the new urban economy through a rich and illuminating account of the rise of the tech sector in New York City. Drawing from original interviews with venture capitalists, tech evangelists, and economic development officials, she shows how the ecosystem forms and reshapes the city from the ground up. Zukin explores the people and plans that have literally rooted digital technology in the city. That in turn has shaped a workforce, molded a mindset, and generated an archipelago of tech spaces, which in combination have produced a now-hegemonic "innovation" culture and geography. She begins with the subculture of hackathons and meetups, introduces startup founders and venture capitalists, and explores the transformation of the Brooklyn waterfront from industrial wasteland to "innovation coastline." She shows how, far beyond Silicon Valley, cities like New York are shaped by an influential "triple helix" of business, government, and university leaders-an alliance that joins C. Wright Mills's "power elite," real estate developers, and ambitious avatars of "academic capitalism." As a result, cities around the world are caught between the demands of the tech economy and communities' desires for growth-a massive and often-insurmountable challenge for those who hope to reap the rewards of innovation's success.

With a Preface reviewing some of the debates prompted by the earlier edition of this book. The first edition of this book was hailed as a major reinterpretation of South African history. It criticised the prevailing view that African agriculture was primitive or backward, and attacked the notion that poverty and lack ofdevelopment were a result of 'traditionalism'. Bundy's work introduced the idea that by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century capitalist development in South Africa was increasingly hostile to peasant producers and a massive onslaught was launched against them - the understanding of this was vital to an understanding of both the South African past and present.

A challenge to prevailing ideas about innovation and a guide to identifying the best growth strategy for your community. Across the world, cities and regions have wasted trillions of dollars on blindly copying the Silicon Valley model of growth creation. Since the early years of the information age, we've been told that economic growth derives from harnessing technological innovation. To do this, places must create good education systems, partner with local research universities, and attract innovative hi-tech firms. We have lived with this system for decades, and the result is clear: a small number of regions and cities at the top of the high-tech industry but many more fighting a losing battle to retain economic dynamism. But are there other models that don't rely on a flourishing high-tech industry? In Innovation in Real Places, Dan Breznitz argues that there are. The purveyors of the dominant ideas on innovation have a feeble understanding of the big picture on global production and innovation. They conflate innovation with invention and suffer from techno-fetishism. In their devotion to start-ups, they refuse to admit that the real obstacle to growth for most cities is the overwhelming power of the real hubs, which siphon up vast amounts of talent and money. Communities waste time, money, and energy pursuing this road to nowhere. Breznitz proposes that communities instead focus on where they fit in the four stages in the global production process. Some are at the highest end, and that is where the Clevelands, Sheffields, and Baltimores are being pushed toward. But that is bad advice. Success lies in understanding the changed structure of the global system of production and then using those insights to enable communities to recognize their own advantages, which in turn allows to them to foster surprising forms of specialized innovation. As he stresses, all localities have certain advantages relative to at least one stage of the global production process, and the trick is in recognizing it. Leaders might think the answer lies in high-tech or high-end manufacturing, but more often than not, they're wrong. Innovation in Real Places is an essential corrective to a mythology of innovation and growth that too many places have bought into in recent years. Best of all, it has the potential to prod local leaders into pursuing realistic and regionally appropriate models for growth and innovation.

Contemporary discussions of Africa's recent growth have largely interpreted such growth in terms of structural transformation, based mainly on national- and sectoral-level data. However, the micro-level processes driving this transformation are still unclear and remain the subject of debate. This collection provides a micro economic foundation for understanding the particular growth processes at work within the region's rural areas, and in so doing provides important insights for policy action. The book provides valuable household- and farm-level evidence about the drivers of rural labour productivity, improvements in access to markets, investment in food value chains, and indeed the role of rural economic growth in Africa's ongoing rural transformation processes. Some of the features of Africa's ongoing rural transformation are similar to those of agricultural transformation as experienced in Asia and elsewhere. However, other features of Africa's rural transformation are unique, and pose important challenges for development policy and planning. Together, the studies compiled in this volume provide an updated, evidence-based, and policy-relevant understanding of where African countries are in their developmental trajectories and the region's prospects for achieving inclusive forms of development over the next several decades. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Development Studies.

The East Country is a work of creative nonfiction in which the acclaimed nature writer Jules Pretty integrates memoir, natural history, cultural critique, and spiritual reflection into a single compelling narrative. Pretty frames his book around Aldo Leopold and his classic A Sand County Almanac, bringing Leopold's ethic-that some could live without nature but most should not-into the twenty-first century. In The East Country, Pretty follows the seasons through seventy-four tales set in a variety of landscapes from valley to salty shore. Pretty convinces us that we should all develop long attachments to the local, observing that the land can change us for the better.

A debut historical novel based on the true story of a young woman in 1920s Virginia fighting to reclaim the daughter she was forced to give up, a case that culminated in a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision. Virginia, 1924. Ruth Ann Riley is 17 years old when she gives birth to a baby girl. Unwed and under-educated, she's deemed "feeble-minded" -- just like her own mother -- and sent to live in a state-run institution where the doctors decide she must be sterilized "for the greater good." But Ruth Ann won't give up her baby Annabel or the hope of future children without a fight, even though her hardscrabble life and sixth-grade education have in no way prepared her to take on the Supreme Court of the United States. As Ruth Ann comes of age in a daunting world and struggles with secrets and scandals in her past, she finds unexpected allies, friendship and the possibility of love in the most unlikely of places. K.D. Alden weaves a harrowing and ultimately uplifting story based on a true American court case that had global ramifications. A reading group guide includes discussion questions, an author essay, and text from the actual historical documents of the case.

A revisionist look at the true state of rural England between the two world wars. England is the country, and the country is England, as Stanley Baldwin famously said in 1924, but what kind of country was it? There are persistent memories of depression and depopulation, of dilapidated villages and deserted country houses, in a period of bitter discontent and disturbance when the brief febrile excitements of the 1920s gave way to the thirties, Auden's "low dishonest decade". Recent work has radically modified the history of the interwar years, but largely from an urban and industrial viewpoint. Hitherto this revisionist perspective has left unquestioned one of the central components of the old orthodoxy: that this was a period of unremitting, unmitigated decline in the countryside. In The English Countryside Between the Wars an interdisciplinary group of scholars have come together to challenge this view. Organised into sections on society, culture, politics and the economy,and embracing subjects as diverse as women novelists and village crafts, the book argues that almost everywhere we look in the countryside between the wars there were signs of new growth and dynamic development. This will be required reading for everyone with an interest in British history between the wars and to lecturers, teachers and students studying social, cultural, political, economic and environmental history, historical and cultural geography, English literature, performance studies and art and design history. Contributors: ALUN HOWKINS, CAITLIN ADAMS, MARION SHAW, MARK RAWLINSON, MICK WALLIS, DAVID JEREMIAH, CHRISTOPHER BAILEY, JOHN SHEAIL, CLARE GRIFFITHS, NICHOLAS MANSFIELD, ROY BRIGDEN

To Know the Soul of a People is a history of religion and race in the agricultural South before the Civil Rights era. Jamil W. Drake chronicles a cadre of social scientists who studied the living conditions of black rural communities, revealing the abject poverty of the Jim Crow south. These university-affiliated social scientists documented shotgun houses, unsanitary privies and contaminated water, scaly hands, enlarged stomachs, and malnourished bodies. However, they also turned their attention to the spiritual possessions, chanted sermons, ecstatic singing, conjuration, dreams and visions, fortune-telling, taboos, and other religious cultures of these communities. These scholars aimed to illuminate the impoverished conditions of their subjects for philanthropic and governmental organizations, as well as the broader American public, in the first half of the 20th century, especially during the Great Depression. Religion was integral to their efforts to chart the long economic depression across the South. From 1924 to 1941, Charles Johnson, Guy Johnson, Allison Davis, Lewis Jones, and other social scientists framed the religious and cultural practices of the black communities as "folk" practices, aiming to reform them and the broader South. Drawing on their correspondence, fieldnotes, and monographs, Drake shows that social scientists' use of "folk" reveals the religion was an important site for highlighting the supposed mental, moral, and cultural deficits of America's so-called folk population. Moreover, these social scientists did not just pioneer rural social science and reform but used their study of religion to plant the seeds of the concept that would become known as the "culture of poverty" in the latter half of the twentieth century. To Know the Soul of a People is an exciting intellectual history that invites us to explore the knowledge that animated the earnest yet shortsighted liberal efforts to reform black and impoverished communities.

This book comprises the proceedings of a rural technologies conference organised by the Rural Technology Action Group (RuTAG), which was conceptualized and initiated by Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) to the Government of India R. Chidambaram in 2003-04. The book highlights case studies and research into providing science and technology interventions for the development of rural areas. Covering various aspects of research carried out in the area of rural technologies, it offers a valuable resource for researchers, professionals, and policymakers alike.

Eerie and menacing, timely and moving, Impossible Causes is an unputdownable novel that examines the consequences of silence kept at young women's expense. 'A tightly told and powerful story of sins, lies and secrets long held' i 'This highly atmospheric tale is both thrilling and poignant' Heat For seven months of the year, the remote island of Lark is fogbound, cut off completely from the mainland. The arrival of three strangers is the cause of much speculation: the first is a charismatic young teacher - the only male teacher on the island - the other two, a mother and her teenage daughter, seeking a place to hide from unspeakable tragedy. What have they come to escape? What will they find waiting for them on Lark? And whose body will soon be found lying in the island's stone circle?

The decline in agricultural and other forms of rural employment in developed countries has created a need for a diversified range of rural businesses. Tourism and recreation are recognized as prime contributors to this process. This book reviews both the theory and practice of rural tourism and recreation. Including numerous case studies and contributions from both academics and practitioners, it illustrates how small enterprises can create and adapt products and markets.

The expansion and transformation of Asian economies is producing class structures, roles and identities that could not easily be predicted from other times and places. The industrialisation of the countryside, in particular, generates new, rural middle classes which straddle the worlds of agriculture and industry in complex ways. Their class position is improvised on the basis of numerous influences and opportunities, and is in constant evolution. Enormous though its total population is, meanwhile, the rural middle class remains invisible to most scholars and policymakers. Contested Capital is the first major work to shed light on an emerging transnational class comprised of many hundreds of millions of people. In India, the 'middle class' has become one of the key categories of economic analysis and developmental forecasting. The discussion suffers from one major oversight: it assumes that the middle class resides uniquely in the cities. As this book demonstrates, however, more than a third of India's middle class is rural, and 17 per cent of rural households belong to the middle class. The book brings this vast and dynamic population into view, so confronting some of the most crucial neglected questions of the contemporary global economy.

Afghanistan in the 20th century was virtually unknown in Europe and America. At peace until the 1970s, the country was seen as a remote and exotic land, visited only by adventurous tourists or researchers. Afghan Village Voices is a testament to this little-known period of peace and captures a society and culture now lost. Prepared by two of the most accomplished and well-known anthropologists of the Middle East and Central Asia, Richard Tapper and Nancy Tapper-Lindisfarne, this is a book of stories told by the Piruzai, a rural Afghan community of some 200 families who farmed in northern Afghanistan and in summer took their flocks to the central Hazarajat mountains. The book comprises a collection of remarkable stories, folktales and conversations and provides unprecedented insight into the depth and colour of these people's lives. Recorded in the early 1970s, the stories range from memories of the Piruzai migration to the north a half century before, to the feuds, ethnic strife and the doings of powerful khans. There are also stories of falling in love, elopements, marriages, childbirth and the world of spirits. The book includes vignettes of the narrators, photographs, maps and a full glossary. It is a remarkable document of Afghanistan at peace, told by a people whose voices have rarely been heard.

'A woven time-travelling book, about love, land, life ... Short stories that link together like trees in a forest' Jackie Morris On a clear Kentucky night in 1888, a young woman risks her life to save a stranger from a drunken mob. Almost a hundred years later, her great-grandson Andy climbs a hill at the edge of town, and is flooded with memories of all he has lived, seen and heard of the past century - of farmers wooing schoolteachers and soldiers trudging home from war; of the first motor car, the Great Depression and Vietnam; of neighbourly feuds and family secrets; of grief and betrayal - and of great friendship that endures for a lifetime. These are Wendell Berry's tales of Port William, a little farming community nestled deep in the Kentucky River valley. They unravel the story of a town over the course of four generations, lovingly chronicling the intertwined lives of the families who call it home. Affectionate, elegiac and wry, these uplifting rural fables invite us to witness the beauty and quiet heroism at the heart of each ordinary, interconnected life.

China's dismantling of the Mao-era rural commune system and return to individual household farming under Deng Xiaoping has been seen as a successful turn away from a misguided social experiment and a rejection of the disastrous policies that produced widespread famine. In this revisionist study, Joshua Eisenman marshals previously inaccessible data to overturn this narrative, showing that the commune modernized agriculture, increased productivity, and spurred an agricultural green revolution that laid the foundation for China's future rapid growth. Red China's Green Revolution tells the story of the commune's origins, evolution, and downfall, demonstrating its role in China's economic ascendance. After 1970, the commune emerged as a hybrid institution, including both collective and private elements, with a high degree of local control over economic decision but almost no say over political ones. It had an integrated agricultural research and extension system that promoted agricultural modernization and collectively owned local enterprises and small factories that spread rural industrialization. The commune transmitted Mao's collectivist ideology and enforced collective isolation so it could overwork and underpay its households. Eisenman argues that the commune was eliminated not because it was unproductive, but because it was politically undesirable: it was the post-Mao leadership led by Deng Xiaoping-not rural residents-who chose to abandon the commune in order to consolidate their control over China. Based on detailed and systematic national, provincial, and county-level data, as well as interviews with agricultural experts and former commune members, Red China's Green Revolution is a comprehensive historical and social scientific analysis that fundamentally challenges our understanding of recent Chinese economic history.

This book provides a broad survey of Chinese rural households, examining ongoing changes in Chinese society and economy through the lens of the situation of rural families in China. Based on data from Zhejiang University's China Rural Household Panel Survey (CRHPS) in 2015 on rural households, which analyses all aspects of grass-roots rural households in China, this volume offers a scientific analysis of social development in rural China, exploring notably the basic structure, employment situation, income and expenditure, social security, and education situation of Chinese rural households, as well as the governance and public services of rural communities.

Wry humour and small-town crime, in the acclaimed Lucian Wing series. Lucian Wing is the sheriff of a backwoods county in Vermont, a hardscrabble place far from the picture-postcard gaze. He is also a man with a problem. Multiple problems, in fact, including a threatening superior; a wandering wife; a hard-drinking father-in-law; a demented mother; a squad of deputies variously overzealous and moronic; a mysterious vigilante band operating in his jurisdiction; and a formidably bloodthirsty local carnivore... Wing needs to draw on all his patience, knowledge, and (especially) humor to resolve things. Not least, to honour what one ambiguous ally refers to as Old Number Five. Praise for Castle Freeman's novels: 'A small miracle - sharp, sly, moving and full of heart.' Nick Cave 'Part comic romp and part nail-biting thriller ... Castle Freeman writes with both wit and a deep understanding of the human psyche, and he does not cheat us out of a dramatic climax.' Guardian 'Shares many small-town, big-crime themes with Cormac McCarthy... it is impossible not to appreciate this.' The Times 'Wonderful... every paragraph a gem. Freeman - like Cormac McCarthy, like Annie Proulx - shows us the awkward realness of lives, and does it with humour, with wry perception, with great style.' R. J. Ellory 'Extremely funny... streamlined storytelling, dead-on dialogue and lyrical descriptions of the bleak, woodsy landscape. This is a meticulous New England miniature, with not a word wasted.' Oprah Magazine 'A fast, memorable read gooey with atmosphere ... a gem that sparkles with sly insight and cuts like a knife.' Boston Globe 'Freeman has a flawless ear for dialogue and a sharp eye for quirky detail ... Superb.' People Magazine 'A brilliant book - laconic, spare, stylish and exciting.' Al Alvarez 'A small masterpiece of black comedy and suspense ... If all novels were this good, Americans would read more.' Kirkus Reviews

North Star Country explores country stores and county fairs, labor unions and dusty roads traveled by peddlers and truck drivers, and farms where families toil. Written in 1945 by acclaimed activist and writer Meridel Le Sueur, this unconventional history shines an uncommon light on the lives of ordinary people in the Upper Midwest.

In the tradition of James Agee and John Dos Passos, Le Sueur creates a mosaic from the fabric of everyday life, including newspapers clippings, private letters, diaries, and lyrics from popular songs. Each quotation and brief vignette opens a window to an entire lifetime or a way of life. North Star Country highlights the struggles of American Indians and offers a fresh sensibility, untangling the history of the Upper Midwest, sorting it out and returning it to the common people, to common readers.

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2022 How rural areas have become uneven proving grounds for the American Dream. Late-stage capitalism is trying to remake rural America in its own image, and the resistance is telling. Small-town economies that have traditionally been based on logging, mining, farming, and ranching now increasingly rely on tourism, second-home ownership, and retirement migration. In Dividing Paradise, Jennifer Sherman tells the story of Paradise Valley, Washington, a rural community where amenity-driven economic growth has resulted in a new social landscape of inequality and privilege, with deep fault lines between old-timers and newcomers. In this complicated cultural reality, "class blindness" allows privileged newcomers to ignore or justify their impact on these towns, papering over the sentiments of anger, loss, and disempowerment of longtime locals. Based on in-depth interviews with individuals on both sides of the divide, this book explores the causes and repercussions of the stark inequity that has become commonplace across the United States. It exposes the mechanisms by which inequality flourishes and by which Americans have come to believe that disparity is acceptable and deserved. Sherman, who is known for her work on rural America, presents here a powerful case study of the ever-growing tensions between those who can and those who cannot achieve their visions of the American dream.

Using the narratives of women who use(d) drugs, this account challenges popular understandings of Appalachia spread by such pundits as JD Vance by documenting how women, families, and communities cope with generational systems of oppression. Prescription opioids are associated with rising rates of overdose deaths and hepatitis C and HIV infection in the US, including in rural Central Appalachia. Yet there is a dearth of studies examining rural opioid use. RX Appalachia explores the gendered inequalities that situate women's encounters with substance abuse treatment as well as additional state interventions targeted at women who use drugs in one of the most impoverished regions in the US.

In this ethnographic study of the rural idyll, Broadlands explores rurality and the pace of rural life. In sharp contrast to the urban analytical emphasis upon speed, it gives careful thought to stasis, as rural places offer everyday opportunities for very different social situations and behavioural interactions. Based on new and extensive RCUK-funded primary research, Sam Hillyard generates an original, rigorous and thoughtful understanding of everyday rural life in the 21st century. Taking the principles of dramaturgy and rural studies scholarship, Broadlands provides a toolkit to make sense of rural change. It uses ethnography to enhance interactionist dramaturgy via cross-references with new theoretical orientations that emphasise the temporal dynamics of space in a 'knowing capitalism'. Where early dramaturgy stressed formal organisations in shaping roles and identity, Broadlands expands these concepts to include informal and transient organisations and associations. Ultimately, the book advances a new model for grasping the complexity of the rural. For researchers and students ofrural and urban sociology, this is an engaging text that reframes our understanding of rurality.

This book explores how rural gender relations are changing in a globalized world. It analyses their development in specific places and the effects of the increasing connectedness and mobility of people. It integrates global experiences by discussing mobility, agriculture, gender identities and international development. Each theme is introduced with an overview of the state of the art in that specific area and integrates the case studies that follow. The contributors present empirical work from the global north and south and, more particularly, Sweden, Norway, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland, UK, Poland, Greece, Italy, Slovenia, Uzbekistan, India, Africa, Asia, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA. The first section explores gender differences in mobility patterns and analyses how mobility affects rural gender identities and relations. The second section focuses on the development of agricultural and rural policies, the response of individuals within farm households, and the implications for gender relations in rural areas. The third section focuses on the construction of identities and the changes occurring in the definition of rural femininity and masculinity as a result of rural transformations. The fourth section examines the role of international development policies in advancing women's well-being in the less developed parts of the world, and some of the unintended consequences of such interventions. The book closes with conclusions and reflections on the position of gender in rural research agendas and in rural academia more generally. Key features: * Empircal work from a wide range of geographical areas * Examines how gender identities are constructed in rural agriculture * Considers how effective development policies are in improving women's well-being This book will be of interest to researchers in rural development and gender issues in the global North and South, and to students of rural sociology, social geography, development studies and gender studies.