Hard Scrabble

<p>A kind of homemade book-imperfect like a handmade thing a prize. It's a galloping spontaneous book on occasion within whooping distance of that greatest and sweetest of country books Ivan Turgenev's <i>A Sportsman's Notebook</i>. -Edward Hoagland <i>New York Times Book Review</i></p> <p>His subjects are trees and brush hired help fences soil armadillos and other wildlife flood and drought local history sheep and goats . . . and they come to us reshaped and reenlivened by his agreeably individual (and sometimes cranky) notions. -<i>New Yorker</i></p> <p>If <i>Goodbye to a River</i> was in some sense Graves's <i>Odyssey</i> this book is his [version of Hesiod's] <i>Works and Days</i>. It is partly a book about work partly a book about nature but mostly a book about belonging. In the end John Graves has learned to belong to his patch of land so thoroughly that at moments he can sense in himself a unity with medieval peasants and Sumerian farmers working with their fields by the Tigris. -Larry McMurtry <i>Washington Post Book World</i></p> <p><i>Hard Scrabble</i> is hard pastoral of the kind we have learned to recognize in Wordsworth Frost Hemingway and Faulkner. It celebrates life in accommodation with a piece of the 'given' creation a recalcitrant four hundred or so acres of Texas cedar brake old field and creek bottom which will require of any genuine resident all the character he can muster. -<i>Southwest Review</i></p>