(Most in Massachusetts already have failed there are 4,000 left in a state with five and a half million people.) The one he describes has survived through a combination of good land, hard work and real genius on the owner’s part in forcing more milk out of his cows. One is an unusually successful dairy farm in Massachusetts, a family farm still thriving when most family farms are doomed to fail. Kramer writes about are both real places and intensely symbolic. He set out to understand why there are so many abandoned farms in America, what forces are shaping-and misshaping-our agriculture. But instead of writing another cute story about his adventures with chickens and shaky barns, he gradually took on a far more ambitious project. He bought an abandoned farm and restored it.

Kramer moved to the country a dozen years ago. Mark Kramer’s “Three Farms” is a distinguished addition to this genre. Books like theirs are the true “new journalism.” What’s new is not the use of novelistic technique, but the use of truly exhaustive research, the shift from quick and easy reporting to the complete tracing of an ecosystem. Joseph Mitchell on what’s at the bottom of New York harbor, Boyd Gibbons writing “Wye Island” and John McPhee encountering archdruids would be fair examples. Over the past generation, a while group of writers has discovered that it’s possible to put several years into a subject that no one would even know mattered until the book came out. No book he was going to write, except maybe one assigned by an editor on a ready-made topic, would sell enough to repay him for his time, his travel, his research. Until quite recently, a good journalist simply didn’t have the time or money to investigate a subject deeply. In 1980, we give away more stuff than that every month or two.Ī similar phenomenon has occurred in the world of journalism. The Army was pleased with itself for having 12 new tanks-new in the sense that they’d been acquired after World War I. Expectations were almost pitifully modest back then. In 1932, the United States ran its armed forces on about a quarter of a percent of the sum it will spend this year. The 1932 Olympics at Lake Placid had total gate receipts of $94,0 replay had a gate from television alone of $15.5 million. Things that used to be done on a shoestring now command vast budgets.

THREE FARMS: MAKING MILK, MEAT & MONEY FROM THE AMERICAN SOIL

Telling true stories mark kramer