A fascinating, but spiritually hollow, book. The author uncritically embraces the middle-class American narrative of progress, in which participation in status-driven consumer society serves as the primary index of success and fulfillment: the bigger the city, the better the shopping, the loftier the colleges, the more successful and fulfilled the person. The book really is, as the title suggests, a story of escape to glittering cities, but that story has a somewhat tacky quality, like the conversation of a namedropper who tediously mentions the famous people he has met, the degrees he has earned, the big cities he has lived in, and so forth. The book is filled with interesting detail and poignant moments, but undergirding it all is a disdainful rejection of the lifestyle it documents. ( )

Man, this was just such an absorbing, well-written book that I hardly know where to begin. I found so much here that I could relate to, and I didn't even grow up on a farm, although my grandpa's small "hobby" farm was next door and I got medium-sized "tastes" of what it was like to be a farm boy between the ages of nine and eighteen, when I finished high school and joined the army. And my "pseudo" farm boy experiences served me well for the rest of my life. Because Harnack makes it clear in his book how important the work, discipline and seasonal rhythms of farm life was in his own maturation. But at the same time, as the title implies, he was also stretching toward a future that would not actively include the farm where he was raised. His college-educated widowed mother was adamant that all four of her children would reach higher than the life of a farmer, and they all did. But, in the meantime, as I read through this book I had to keep stopping and would silently exclaim to myself, "Yes! That's exactly how it was!" Or almost, at any rate. As an example, Harnack describes a fishing trip where his Uncle Jack takes the whole tribe of siblings and cousins to catch "bullheads." Their expedition is successful and they have a feast that first night -

"The white sweet flesh was rather mealy, delicately fish-flavored. We were told - and knew - that we were privileged to be eating a truly rare delicacy; we savored each morsel and sucked the spines."

I was never fond of fishing as a kid, and only went with my dad a couple of times. But Dad loved to fish and often brought home a mixed mess of bluegills, lake perch and sunfish, which he cleaned and fileted for a sumptuous feast cooked by Mom in the same way Harnack describes. Our lakeside neighbor favored bass, both as a game fish and a delicacy. But he and my dad were unanimous in their opinion that bullheads, bottom-feeding suckers, were trash fish, and always threw them back when they happened to catch them. A perhaps minor, but interesting distinction between my childhood and Harnack's. His other tales of cows, pigs and chickens - gathering, candling, cleaning and bartering eggs - all ring true to my own memories, although I will freely admit I never had all the responsibilities and heavy labor that Harnack and his siblings and cousins bore. His descriptions of the barns that his grandfather built and and how they were, in many ways, the center of life on a farm, reminded me of Anne-Marie Oomen's wonderful memoir, PULLING DOWN THE BARN, in which she characterized her family's barn as cathedral-like and absolutely central to their life. Harnack's book also brought to mind another memoir, EIGHTY ACRES: ELEGY FOR A FAMILY FARM, by Ron Jager, who grew up near McBain, Michigan, less than an hour from my own childhood home, here in Reed City. Harnack's depiction of the strict separation of the various religions in his small town also rang true for me, causing me to remember how the nuns who taught us in the Catholic school always warned us to never set foot in any of those Protestant churches, of which there were several in our town. For doing so would constitute, if not a grave sin, then certainly a dangerous "occasion of sin" for us "chosen of God" of the Catholic faith. There is one other facet of small-town and farm community living mentioned in Harnack's book which is disturbing to me, because I have seen it to be true here, in this town where I grew up and came back to after nearly forty years away. It is the closed clannishness of large families, most of whom never left and have married and raised succeeding generations. Harnack mentions how when, once a year, all the surrounding farmers and their families would meet at the Harnack farm to work out a schedule for threshing season.

"Mother and Aunt Lizzie felt a trifle uneasy, for this was the only night of the year when our visitors were other than relatives. With so many dozens of kin on both sides of the family, we needed no further friends."

I have heard friends of mine from childhood, the ones who never left town, say the same thing - that they have such big families they don't ever need to visit with other people, outside of family. Such smug insularity initially shocked me, but I have grown used to such comments and attitudes in the past few years. It is a part of small town life. I could keep on, but suffice it to say this is one hell of a good book. I liked it much better than another recent memoir of Depression-era Iowa farm life, LITTLE HEATHENS, perhaps because it was from a male point of view and didn't shrink from the biological lessons also learned on a farm. I hope this book finds a new life in a new edition soon, because it strongly deserves a new generation of readers. I will recommend it highly to my other reader friends and lovers of good books. ( )

1603 We Have All Gone Away, by Curtis Harnack (read 13 Dec 1980) This is a series of twelve vignettes of Harnack's life growing up on a farm in the Remsen, Iowa, area, about the time I was growing up on an Iowa farm. Many of the things he talks of are very familiar, and some are different. As usual in Harnack, there is a lot of bitterness, although there are pleasant things as well. The account of threshing oats is pretty accurate, I thought, and one knows he knows whereof he writes. ( )