From a Limestone Ledge

John Graves

With the same craft and wit, the highly acclaimed author of Goodbye to a River and Hard Scrabble here writes about nature and man on his own rough "patch" of Texas land. Unsentimentally, gracefully, with a true countryman's earthly good sense, John Graves talks about cows, bees, goats, about the satisfaction of making (and drinking) wines, about snuff and chewing tobacco, about the landscape and thee living. From a Limestone Ledge is a celebration of "the casual but constant observation of detail, the noticingness of a rural life," a treatise on the pleasures and hardships of doing things for oneself, a nostalgic meditation on country ways. At once encyclopedist and raconteur, Graves shares a compulsion to hoard junk, his stubborn refusal to raise chickens the right way, and his preference for visiting, and not living with, goats. In his work, Graves considers every creature and aspect of country life that has lured--or forced-- his attention during two decades of living on, and working, a battered and recalcitrant stock from in the cedar-covered limestone hills of North Central Texas.