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Jorwerd: The Death of the Village in Late Twentieth-Century Europe - Softcover

 
9781860468032: Jorwerd: The Death of the Village in Late Twentieth-Century Europe
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Is progress always a good thing, or is modernity destroying those social values that once underpinned all our lives?

Using the Friesian village of Jorwerd as an example, Geert Mak discovers a neighborliness and a sense of community that no longer exist in urban life, portraying ancient families struggling to preserve their long-established modus vivendi in a world obsessed with money and profit. He has tea with the butcher's wife, drops into the pub for a beer with locals, and recounts the stirring story of Old Peet, a farmhand who was born, lived, and died in Jorwerd. Such people are an extinct species in the new free market and, with their passing, the village they lived in moved a step along the road of terminal decline.

By interweaving the colorful stories of Frieslanders with the wider history of the world, Mak provides us with an unsentimental portrayal of the pleasures and hardships of living in the country, while at the same time illustrating how rural life everywhere has been affected by a diaspora to cities and other countries (particularly in the case of Friesland to North America and Canada), and is under threat from the modern world.

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About the Author:
Geert Mak is one of the Netherlands' most prominent journalists and is the author of Amsterdam: Biography of a City, to be published by Harvard University Press.
From Publishers Weekly:
"Real storytelling is a gift; an almost forgotten talent," says Mak, a Netherlands journalist, as he conveys how a farming community used the oral tradition, "the literature of the poor and unseen," to preserve its history. In this study of a small village in the northern Netherlands, Mak describes the demise of this tradition as a part of the vast cultural transformation that has taken place from 1945 to the present. From the 650 people who lived in Jorwerd in 1900, speaking the Frisian rather than the Dutch language, the population has fallen to 330. Farming as a way of life has been dramatically altered by mechanization, and the resulting increased productivity led to quotas set by the government, which restricted, for example, the amount of milk a dairy farmer could produce. This policy had a negative impact on small farming families. The interviews Mak conducted with Jorwerd's residents, for whom he obviously has a great deal of affection, make clear that the centuries-old bond between the farmer and his land has also been eroded. Progress has brought development and newcomers to Jorwerd. This influx of city people who have come to enjoy rural life has also changed the town's social mores, formerly based on traditional family values. Although the author recognizes the oppressiveness inherent in small villages, he mourns the ebbing sense of community that held them together. Mak's study of Jorwerd is a mirror for other countries where farming life is on the wane.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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  • PublisherHarvill Pr
  • Publication date2001
  • ISBN 10 1860468039
  • ISBN 13 9781860468032
  • BindingPaperback
  • Number of pages288
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