Curtis Harnack

This is the story of a youth spent without fear during the Great Depression. The author was born one of seven in an Iowa farmhouse hand built by his prairie sodbreaker grandfather. "We were all taught to lean enthusiastically into the future." Through episodes of zest and severity, human warmth and tragic interest, each generation of this vital family keeps its colorful eye on the American promise of cities and distance. Their stories move one as in a novel: the hired hand who knows no English or farming, the young girl who teaches her first pupils only pinochle, the powerful uncles and aunts so versed in the humors of life or death, and most of all the author himself, who will have to take that same giant urban step which all the world has, leaving behind an intimate life from which we have all gone away.

"These reminiscences of a childhood on an Iowa farm are exceptionally good, their artistry and honesty shaping each chapter to make the reader an elegant gift of the author's experience. The book teems with fully realized characters, some likable, some affecting, and at least one purely hilarious."
"His fond, intimately detailed evocations of the often harsh lives of Iowa farm people misses none of the warmth of family life, kinship and community common to the American rural experience."
"In the pure zest and detail of Mr. Harnack's descriptions, one can feel the solidity, the deep satisfactions, of life on that Iowa farm."
"Captures forever the vital juices of a vanished time...a quiet, deeply moving book."