Softcover

ISBN 10: 1559630280 ISBN 13: 9781559630283

Publisher: Island Press, 1991

Richard Critchfield, author of the best-selling books Villages and An American Looks at Britain, examines the inescapable link between the decline of America's rural roots and the decay of our cities. Trees, Why Do You Wait? is a moving oral history chronicling the changes taking place in rural America. Through it, we meet real people of the heartland and feel the suffering and the strength in their relationship to the land.

About the Author:

Richard Critchfield is the author of An American Looks at Britain; Those Days; The Long Charade; and a village trilogy Villages, Shahhat, and The Golden Bowl Be Broken.

From Library Journal:

This is a distressing study of the decline of two small farming communities in Iowa and North Dakota by the author of Villages (LJ 5/15/81). In the first chapter, Critchfield discusses the development and decline of rural societies around the world. He then features interviews with prosperous, semi-prosperous, and poor farmers from the two communities who provide important insights into the sociological and economic forces that contributed to the decline of farming in their areas. Critchfield asserts that the survival of the urban sector is dependent upon a thriving rural sector, and he presents proposals for saving family farms and rural communities from prominent people in agriculture. Like Janet Fitchen in Endangered Spaces, Endangered Places ( LJ 3/1/91), Critchfield offers a disturbing look at America's rural infrastructure.
-Irwin Weintraub, Rutgers Univ. Libs., Piscataway, N.J.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.