Preservation - Hardcover

Svenson, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571198406 ISBN 13: 9780571198405

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 1994

What do we keep and why do we keep it? If something is worth keeping, how do we go about preserving it? These are the questions Peter Svenson addresses in Preservation, a moving and eloquent meditation on the idea of preservation, public and private, natural and historical.
Svenson, an abstract artist and the author of the critically acclaimed Battlefield: Farming a Civil War Battleground, lives on and farms a field that was the site of a Civil War battle in Virginia. He begins Preservation with the impulse to preserve the battlefield and other Civil War monuments, questioning what is being memorialized both physically and morally, and pointing out that how we choose to memorialize something is as important as what we choose to remember about it.
He then moves to the idea of saving the farmland surrounding his own - land that, without intervention, will probably be sold for development within the next generation. He describes his struggles to maintain his fields without the use of chemicals and to painstakingly refurbish old farm implements. At the same time, he brings the ambivalence of his neighbors toward the historical and financial demands of their property into sharp focus.
Interspersed throughout is a memoir of Svenson's New England boyhood in which he evokes and thereby preserves his best self at a variety of ages and contemplates how these selves are incorporated into - or missing from - the middle-aged man he is today.
Graceful, impassioned, and personal, Preservation is a call to all of us to appreciate what needs to be preserved in the world and in the self.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

From Library Journal:

Svenson's (Battlefield: Farming a Civil War Battleground, Faber & Farber, 1992) graceful meditation on personal history alternates autobiographical chapters with a description of his farming equipment and methods. His Virginia hay farm is on the site of a Civil War battle, and he believes that "the best way to preserve a battleground that was farmed in the 1860s is to keep farming it." While considering Civil War monuments and his farm's history, he concludes that "it is the person within me that needs preserving." To that end he provides an engaging memoir of his childhood and youth, ending as a young man in his mid-twenties, which he regards as his best self. Svenson reminds us with this compelling perspective on historical preservation that history is life, a continuum of past and present. A worthwhile purchase for public libraries.
Wendy Knickerbocker, Rhode Island Coll. Lib., Providence
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly:

Svenson follows Battlefield: Farming a Civil War Battlefield with a general reflection on why societies and individuals choose to memorialize certain things and sacrifice others. The author integrates this with a memoir of his rootless childhood and an adult life described as "anchorless" until he discovered his battlefield farm in Virginia and fought to save it from 20th-century challenges--especially highways. Paving, Svenson asserts, is killing. Farming is life. Chapters on Svenson's school days, college experience and hitch in the Navy are conventional in comparison with his lyrical descriptions of making hay and debating the pros and cons of herbicides. A refreshing story of a person who has established personal equilibrium in a society that persists in making whirl its king.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.