Long time appleJAC member Stephen Archer from Columbia, MO has just published his new book, I, Clodhopper!:an agrarian getaway
In I, CLODHOPPER! an agrarian getaway the author recalls with a dry wit his childhood on a Midwestern family farm. Farming had little attraction for him, and he sought alternate existences, finding city life (“where all the people were”) much more appealing. On the farm he worried that he might be worked plumb to death juggling hay bales, tending to cow-brutes and other beasts, and spreading manure over the fields. He describes his primary education in a one-room, one teacher country grade school as crude, but in it he discovered the wonderful world of book and reading. When he began high school, he found success as an actor, although his grades began to plummet. Much the same happened in his first two years of college, so he dropped out and served a twenty-seven-month sentence in a crayon factory, then fled back successfully to higher education. In time he became a college professor, which he found more challenging and satisfying than plowing corn fields. In the final chapter (Who Cares? So What?), he muses on the care and feeding of one’s happiness, looking back over the first years of his life.
Kirkus Reviews dubbed this book “a delightfully laid-back, entertaining take on country living, adding “this memoir is laugh-out-loud funny.” Beta readers offered such comments as •“. . . a masterly job of capturing time and place, and [the author’s] evolving consciousness from child to boy to young man.”• “. . . absolutely the wittiest and most endearing, human, honest and surprising book I’ve ever read.”•“I woke up sore in the ribs . . . because I laughed myself silly throughout [this] wonderful book.”•“I’ve laughed, hee-heed, guffawed and otherwise made rude noises. . . .”
I, Clodhopper! is available from Amazon.com
