John Hildebrand
Autore di Mapping The Farm: The Chronicle of a Family
Sull'Autore
John Hildebrand teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
Opere di John Hildebrand
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Data di nascita
- 1949-05-18
- Sesso
- male
- Istruzione
- University of Michigan
University of Alaska - Attività lavorative
- professor
Utenti
Recensioni
Premi e riconoscimenti
Potrebbero anche piacerti
Statistiche
- Opere
- 8
- Utenti
- 195
- Popolarità
- #112,377
- Voto
- 3.8
- Recensioni
- 11
- ISBN
- 16
The narrative is filled with memorable vignettes but suffers from an overall murkiness of purpose. The title, for example, doesn't really capture what is going on here. Hildebrand wants to provide an alternative to the typical ways in which land is mapped (aerial surveys, land-use maps, etc.) by making us see the people on the land and the texture of the land itself. As he notes at one point, most of us see farmland only as we blast past it on a freeway, and "The anonymity of farmland is what makes it so easily converted to other purposes" (chiefly strip malls and butt-ugly housing developments. But the story here is scattered, the various members of the family sometimes hard to keep straight (a basic family tree would have been an enormous help), and the overall intent of this project isn't clear. It isn't really a re-mapping in even a metaphorical sense. He seems to want to avoid an elegiac tone, and yet that is probably the best characterization of the book. Maps are fundamentally tools designed to help us do something but it isn't clear what either Hildebrand or we are supposed to do with this remapped map.… (altro)