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› Find signed collectible books: 'Against The Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'All over Creation'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Another Turn of the Crank: Essays'
This popular collection features six essays on sustainability and stewardship from one of America's most important cultural critics. Provocative, intimate, and thoughtful, Another Turn of the Crank reaches to the heart of Wendell Berry's concern for our nation, its communities, and their future. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'At Nature's Pace'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Better Off: Flipping The Switch On Technology'
What is the least we need to achieve the most? With this question in mind, MIT graduate Eric Brende flipped the switch on technology. He and his wife, Mary, ditched their car, electric stove, refrigerator, running water, and everything else motorized or hooked to the grid, and spent eighteen months living in a remote community so primitive in its technology that even the Amish consider it antiquated. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Botany of Desire: A Plant'S-Eye View of the World'
Working in his garden one day, Michael Pollan hit pay dirt in the form of an idea: do plants, he wondered, use humans as much as we use them? While the question is not entirely original, the way Pollan examines this complex coevolution by looking at the natural world from the perspective of plants is unique. The result is a fascinating and engaging look at the true nature of domestication.
In making his point, Pollan focuses on the relationship between humans and four specific plants: apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes. He uses the history of John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed) to illustrate how both the apple's sweetness and its role in the production of alcoholic cider made it appealing to settlers moving west, thus greatly expanding the plant's range. He also explains how human manipulation of the plant has weakened it, so that "modern apples require more pesticide than any other food crop." The tulipomania of 17th-century Holland is a backdrop for his examination of the role the tulip's beauty played in wildly influencing human behavior to both the benefit and detriment of the plant (the markings that made the tulip so attractive to the Dutch were actually caused by a virus). His excellent discussion of the potato combines a history of the plant with a prime example of how biotechnology is changing our relationship to nature. As part of his research, Pollan visited the Monsanto company headquarters and planted some of their NewLeaf brand potatoes in his garden--seeds that had been genetically engineered to produce their own insecticide. Though they worked as advertised, he made some startling discoveries, primarily that the NewLeaf plants themselves are registered as a pesticide by the EPA and that federal law prohibits anyone from reaping more than one crop per seed packet. And in a interesting aside, he explains how a global desire for consistently perfect French fries contributes to both damaging monoculture and the genetic engineering necessary to support it.
Pollan has read widely on the subject and elegantly combines literary, historical, philosophical, and scientific references with engaging anecdotes, giving readers much to ponder while weeding their gardens. --Shawn Carkonen [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural'
Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer and poet, may look like a Southern gentleman of conservative bearing, but in truth he stands among the foremost radical writers of our time: opposed to the dominant order, but, more important, radical in the primary sense, one who advocates a return to the source, the root, the old ways, in this case, of farming and living on the land. In The Unsettling of America and its companion volumes A Continuous Harmony and The Gift of Good Land, Berry discusses how rural communities can be made and maintained, how an ethic of wise land use can replace the dominant thinking of our present food-as-commodity economics. Berry has been accused of being an impractical romantic, but after reading his books you're likely to think that his ideas are well worth a try. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Contrary Farmer'
Gene Logsdon offers an alternative to the decline of the family farm by explaining how to successfully engage in what he calls "cottage farming" part-time for enjoyment as well as profit. This book gives readers the tools and information they need to grow their own food in a sustainable and Earth-friendly fashion, but it also tells some great, hilarious stories and includes some truly beautiful and evocative writing. This is not a dry, "how-to" book; it's a really great read even if you haven't a clue about (or any interest in) farming. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living'
In this sensual, witty, and startlingly original first novel, Jean Finnegan searches for her place in a tumultuous world wracked by the Great Depression and the beginning of World War II. Carrie Tiffany captures the frailty and beauty of the human condition and vividly evokes the hope and disappointment of an era.
Billowing dust and information, the government "Better Farming Train" slides through the wheat fields and small towns of Australia, bringing advice to the people living on the land. The train is staffed by irresistibly eccentric agricultural and domestic experts, from Sister Crock, the prim head of "women's subjects," to Mr. Ohno, the Japanese chicken specialist, to Robert Pettergree, a scientist with an unusual taste for soil. Amid the swaying cars full of cows, pigs, and wheat, a strange and swift seduction occurs between Robert and Jean. In an atmosphere of heady scientific idealism they settle in the impoverished Mallee farmland with the ambition of transforming the land through science.
In luminous prose, Tiffany writes about the challenges of farming, the character of small towns, the stark and terrifying beauty of the Australian landscape, and the fragile relationships among man, science, and nature. Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living is a passionate and heartbreaking novel from an astonishing new writer. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Farmers of Forty Centuries: Or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea, and Japan'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Farming:a Hand Book: A Hand Book'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Farming: A Handbook'
"Love the world. Work for nothing. / Take all that you have and be poor. / Love someone who does not deserve it," writes Wendell Berry in the persona of "the mad farmer," a conservative landsman who deeply opposes the then-current war in Vietnam and the ongoing crisis of farming and the environment. Lyric, satiric, didactic, by turns funny and earnest, the poems collected in Farming, most from the late 1960s, established Berry as a social critic and artist of the first order. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fast Food Nation'
On any given day, one out of four Americans opts for a quick and cheap meal at a fast-food restaurant, without giving either its speed or its thriftiness a second thought. Fast food is so ubiquitous that it now seems as American, and harmless, as apple pie. But the industry's drive for consolidation, homogenization, and speed has radically transformed America's diet, landscape, economy, and workforce, often in insidiously destructive ways. Eric Schlosser, an award-winning journalist, opens his ambitious and ultimately devastating exposé with an introduction to the iconoclasts and high school dropouts, such as Harlan Sanders and the McDonald brothers, who first applied the principles of a factory assembly line to a commercial kitchen. Quickly, however, he moves behind the counter with the overworked and underpaid teenage workers, onto the factory farms where the potatoes and beef are grown, and into the slaughterhouses run by giant meatpacking corporations. Schlosser wants you to know why those French fries taste so good (with a visit to the world's largest flavor company) and "what really lurks between those sesame-seed buns." Eater beware: forget your concerns about cholesterol, there is--literally--feces in your meat.
Schlosser's investigation reaches its frightening peak in the meatpacking plants as he reveals the almost complete lack of federal oversight of a seemingly lawless industry. His searing portrayal of the industry is disturbingly similar to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, written in 1906: nightmare working conditions, union busting, and unsanitary practices that introduce E. coli and other pathogens into restaurants, public schools, and homes. Almost as disturbing is his description of how the industry "both feeds and feeds off the young," insinuating itself into all aspects of children's lives, even the pages of their school books, while leaving them prone to obesity and disease. Fortunately, Schlosser offers some eminently practical remedies. "Eating in the United States should no longer be a form of high-risk behavior," he writes. Where to begin? Ask yourself, is the true cost of having it "your way" really worth it? --Lesley Reed [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal'
On any given day, one out of four Americans opts for a quick and cheap meal at a fast-food restaurant, without giving either its speed or its thriftiness a second thought. Fast food is so ubiquitous that it now seems as American, and harmless, as apple pie. But the industry's drive for consolidation, homogenization, and speed has radically transformed America's diet, landscape, economy, and workforce, often in insidiously destructive ways. Eric Schlosser, an award-winning journalist, opens his ambitious and ultimately devastating exposé with an introduction to the iconoclasts and high school dropouts, such as Harlan Sanders and the McDonald brothers, who first applied the principles of a factory assembly line to a commercial kitchen. Quickly, however, he moves behind the counter with the overworked and underpaid teenage workers, onto the factory farms where the potatoes and beef are grown, and into the slaughterhouses run by giant meatpacking corporations. Schlosser wants you to know why those French fries taste so good (with a visit to the world's largest flavor company) and "what really lurks between those sesame-seed buns." Eater beware: forget your concerns about cholesterol, there is--literally--feces in your meat.
Schlosser's investigation reaches its frightening peak in the meatpacking plants as he reveals the almost complete lack of federal oversight of a seemingly lawless industry. His searing portrayal of the industry is disturbingly similar to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, written in 1906: nightmare working conditions, union busting, and unsanitary practices that introduce E. coli and other pathogens into restaurants, public schools, and homes. Almost as disturbing is his description of how the industry "both feeds and feeds off the young," insinuating itself into all aspects of children's lives, even the pages of their school books, while leaving them prone to obesity and disease. Fortunately, Schlosser offers some eminently practical remedies. "Eating in the United States should no longer be a form of high-risk behavior," he writes. Where to begin? Ask yourself, is the true cost of having it "your way" really worth it? --Lesley Reed [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fields Without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Idea'
Classicist, professor, and farmer Hanson chronicles the decline of small-scale agriculture in the Central Valley of California. He takes his classics seriously, likening the raisin farmers of Modesto to Aeschylus' ideal virtuous man, who "did not wish to seem just, but to be so." He takes modern cultural dictates less seriously: "Is it not odd," he writes, "to rise at dawn with Japanese-, Mexican-, Pakistani-, Armenian-, and Portuguese-American farmers and then be lectured at noonday 40 miles away on campus about cultural sensitivity and the need for 'diversity' by the affluent white denizens of an exclusive, tree-studded suburb?" Hanson relates the life stories of his farmer neighbors, writing that their way of life will likely soon disappear, thanks in part to a federal system of agricultural subsidies that favors large-scale, industrial farm corporations over individual "yeomen." This is a sobering and eye-opening book. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Five Acres and Independence'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Five Acres and Independence: A Handbook for Small Farm Management'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Georgics'
A eulogy to Italy as the temperate land of perpetual spring, and a celebration of the values of rustic piety, "The Georgics" is probably the supreme achievement of Latin poetry. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Georgics of Virgil'
Georgics is a popular classic work written by Virgil. This kindle digital edition of Georgics has been professionally designed and maintains the quality of the original classic publication. Georgics is highly recommended for those who enjoy the writings of Virgil and also those discovering the works of Virgil for the first time. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Georgics of Virgil'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Georgics Of Virgil: A Translation'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Gift of Good Land'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural'
In this collection of essays, continuing the argument begun with The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry writes of the importance of good farming to a healthy culture. By health he means not the mere absence of disease, but the operation of a balanced, nondestructive way of life; his essays on the Amish people of Pennsylvania and Ohio offer a model. "An economy of waste," Berry writes, "is incompatible with a healthy environment"--an environment that operates in balance, within bounds. Arguing for the primacy of family-based, local economies, and for the exercise of intelligence, reverence, and community values, Berry crafts a prose idyll celebrating the pastoral existence. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Guns, Germs & Steel: The Fates of Human Societies'
With a new chapter. The phenomenal bestseller; over 1.5 million copies sold; is now a major PBS special.Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs, and Steel is a brilliant work answering the question of why the peoples of certain continents succeeded in invading other continents and conquering or displacing their peoples. This edition includes a new chapter on Japan and all-new illustrations drawn from the television series. Until around 11,000 BC, all peoples were still Stone Age hunter/gatherers. At that point, a great divide occurred in the rates that human societies evolved. In Eurasia, parts of the Americas, and Africa, farming became the prevailing mode of existence when indigenous wild plants and animals were domesticated by prehistoric planters and herders. As Jared Diamond vividly reveals, the very people who gained a head start in producing food would collide with preliterate cultures, shaping the modern world through conquest, displacement, and genocide.The paths that lead from scattered centers of food to broad bands of settlement had a great deal to do with climate and geography. But how did differences in societies arise? Why weren't native Australians, Americans, or Africans the ones to colonize Europe? Diamond dismantles pernicious racial theories tracing societal differences to biological differences. He assembles convincing evidence linking germs to domestication of animals, germs that Eurasians then spread in epidemic proportions in their voyages of discovery. In its sweep, Guns, Germs and Steel encompasses the rise of agriculture, technology, writing, government, and religion, providing a unifying theory of human history as intriguing as the histories of dinosaurs and glaciers. 32 illustrations [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Guns, Germs, and Steel Reader's Companion'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'How to Grow More Vegetables: And Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine'
A classic in the field of sustainable gardening, HOW TO GROW MORE VEGETABLES shows how to produce a beautiful organic garden with minimal watering and care, whether it's just a few tomatoes in a tiny backyard or enough food to feed a family of four on less than half an acre. Updated with the latest biointensive tips and techniques, this is an essential reference for gardeners of all skill levels seeking to grow some or all of their own food. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'How to Grow More Vegetables: Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Letters From An American Farmer'
Written by an emigrant French aristocrat turned farmer, the Letters from an American Farmer (1782) posed the famous question: "What, then, is the American, this new man?", as a new nation took shape before the eyes of the world. Addressing some of American literature's most pressing concerns and identity issues, these Letters celebrate personal determination, freedom from institutional oppression, and the largeness and fertility of the land. They also address darker and more symbolic elements, particularly slavery. This book is the only critical edition available of what is seen by many as the first-ever work of American literature. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Letters from an American Farmer ; And, Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Living at Nature's Pace: Farming and the American Dream'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The New Organic Grower: A Master's Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals'
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals [Paperback] [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'On Good Land : The Autobiography of an Urban Farm'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Oranges'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Raising Less Corn, More Hell: The Case For The Independent Farm And Against Industrial Food'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Seeds of Change: Five Plants That Transformed Mankind'
In this book, the author takes five commercial plants - sugar, tea, cotton, potatoes and quinine - and shows how man's need, or greed, for these products has changed the face of history and shaped destinies. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Seeds of Change: Six Plants That Transformed Mankind'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Square Foot Gardening: A New Way To Garden In Less Space With Less Work'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Story of Corn'
The Story of Corn is a unique compendium, drawing upon history and mythology, science and art, anecdote and image, personal narrative and epic to tell the extraordinary story of the grain that built the New World. Corn transformed the way the entire world eats, providing a hardy, inexpensive alternative to rice or wheat and cheap fodder for livestock and finding its way into everything from explosives to embalming fluid.
Betty Fussell has given us a true American saga, interweaving the histories of the indigenous peoples who first cultivated the grain and the European conquerors who appropriated and propagated it around the globe. She explores corn's roles as food, fetish, crop, and commodity to those who have planted, consumed, worshiped, processed, and profited from it for seven centuries.
Now available only from the University of New Mexico Press, The Story of Corn, is the winner of a Julia Child Cookbook Award from the International Association of Culinary Professionals.
"Written in a lively and nontechnical style."--Library Journal
"Fussell has clearly done a good deal of research and a lot of traveling--peering over a precipice at Machu Picchu, descending into a restored ceremonial kiva of the Anasazi people in New Mexico, visiting the sole surviving corn palace from the Midwest boosters--glory days of a century ago."--Kirkus Reviews
[via]› Find signed collectible books: 'Traditional American Farming Techniques: A Ready Reference on All Phases of Agriculture for Farmers of the United States and Canada'
Traditional American Farming Techniques remains as valuable today as when it was first published in 1916. More than a thousand pages brim with information - everything from the science behind crop rotation to the specifics of breeding better hogs; from raising perfect celery to maximizing yields in subtropical citrus groves; from growing and curing the best tobacco to making the best butter; from the care and management of draft animals to the details of replacing them with trucks and tractors; from improving farm soils to dealing with insect infestations and diseases of crops and livestock using methods today's organic farmers would recognize and approve. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Unsettling of America'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Virgil Georgics'
Virgil's Georgics, considered to be one of the great poems of Western literature, is ostensibly a didactic poem on agriculture. Challenging this idea, the late Sir Roger Mynors argues that the poem's true subject is humanity and its place in nature and society. The poem is also a landmark in the use of the natural world as material for literature and of special interest because the poet draws not only on his own experience but also on his wide reading of Greek poetry. This commentary examines Virgil's meaning and choice of expression to provide a fuller understanding of the poetry. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Virgil's Georgics'
Virgils Georgics is a paean to the earth and all that grows and grazes there. It is an ancient work, yet one that speaks to our times as powerfully as it did to the poets. This unmatched translation presents the poem in an American idiom that is elegant and sensitive to the meaning and rhythm of the original. Janet Lembke brings a faithful version of Virgils celebratory poem to modern readers who are interested in classic literature and who relish reading about animals and gardens.
The word georgics means farming. Virgil was born to a farming family, and his poem gives specific instructions to Italian farmers along with a passionate message to care for the land and for the crops and animals that it sustains. The Georgics is also a heartfelt cry for returning farmers and their families to land they had lost through a series of dispiriting political events. It is often considered the most technically accomplished and beautiful of all of Virgils work.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Virgil's Georgics: A Modern English Verse'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Why We Eat What We Eat: How the Encounter Between the New World and the Old Changed the Way Everyone on the Planet Eats'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Virgil: The Georgics, Books I and II'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Virgil Vol. 1, Bks. I-II : The Georgics'
These two volumes provide a commentary, with text, on Virgil's Georgics, a poem in four books probably written between 35 and 29 BC. The introduction, in Volume 1, treats the poem's historical background and its relationship to the early years of Augustan Rome, Virgil's use of prior literary material, his stylistic and metrical expertise, and questions of poetic structure. There is also a section interpreting the poem in light of recent scholarship, which seeks to consider the poem as part of the broad unity of Virgil's career, rather than from a narrow didactic approach. A new Latin text of the poem is followed by extensive line-by-line commentary, explaining difficult passages, interpreting poetic intent, and tracing the influence of Virgil's Greek and Roman antecedents. A subject index and indexes of important Greek and Latin words conclude each volume. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Virgil Vol. 2, Bks. III-IV : The Georgics'
These two volumes provide a commentary, with text, on Virgil's Georgics, a poem in four books probably written between 35 and 29 BC. The introduction, in Volume 1, treats the poem's historical background and its relationship to the early years of Augustan Rome, Virgil's use of prior literary material, his stylistic and metrical expertise, and questions of poetic structure. There is also a section interpreting the poem in light of recent scholarship, which seeks to consider the poem as part of the broad unity of Virgil's career, rather than from a narrow didactic approach. A new Latin text of the poem is followed by extensive line-by-line commentary, explaining difficult passages, interpreting poetic intent, and tracing the influence of Virgil's Greek and Roman antecedents. A subject index and indexes of important Greek and Latin words conclude each volume. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Armas, germenes y acero/ Guns, Germs and Steel'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Georgicas'
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