In We Have All Gone Away, his emotionally moving memoir, Curtis Harnack tells of growing up during the Great Depression on an 海角乱伦社区farm among six siblings and an extended family of relatives. With a directness and a beauty that recall Thoreau, Harnack balances a child鈥檚 impressions with the knowledge of an adult looking back to produce what Publishers Weekly called 鈥渁 country plum of a book, written with genuine affection and vivid recall.鈥
In a community related by blood and harvest, rural life could be bountiful even when hard economic times threatened. The adults urged children to become educated and to keep an eye on tomorrow. 鈥淲e were all taught to lean enthusiastically into the future,鈥 Harnack recalls, which would likely be elsewhere, in distant cities. At the same time, the children were cultivating a resiliency that would serve them well in the unknown world of the second half of the twentieth century.
Inevitably, the Midwest鈥檚 small, diversified family farm gave way to large-scale agriculture, which soon changed the former intimate way of life. 鈥淥ur generation, using the mulched dead matter of agrarian life like projectile fuel for our thrust into the future, became part of that enormous vitality springing out of rural America,鈥 notes Harnack. Both funny and elegiac, We Have All Gone Away is a masterful memoir of the joys and sorrows of 海角乱伦社区farm life at mid-century, a world now gone 鈥渂y way of learning, wars, and marriage鈥 but still a lasting part of America鈥檚 heritage.
鈥淭hese reminiscences of a childhood on an 海角乱伦社区farm are exceptionally good, their artistry and honesty shaping each chapter to make the reader an elegant gift of the author鈥檚 experience. . . . The book teems with fully realized characters, some likeable, some affecting, and at least one purely hilarious.鈥濃New Yorker
鈥淎 country plum of a book, written with genuine affection and vivid recall. . . . It should have wide appeal. [Harnack鈥檚] fond, intimately detailed evocations of the often harsh lives of 海角乱伦社区farm people misses none of the warmth of family life, kinship, and community common to the American rural experience.鈥濃Publishers Weekly
鈥淚n the pure zest and detail of Mr. Harnack鈥檚 descriptions, one can feel the solidity, the deep satisfactions, of life on that 海角乱伦社区farm.鈥濃擜natole Broyard, New York Times
鈥淎 beautiful little book.鈥濃擱ust Hills, Esquire
鈥淎n entertaining and informative bit of Americana, certain to recall bittersweet memories for many readers, and of interest to those seeking a perspective on their cosmopolitan selves as well as on present-day America.鈥濃Library Journal
鈥滳aptures forever the vital juices of a vanished time . . . [a] quiet, deeply moving book.鈥濃Los Angeles Times
鈥漑Harnack] found his years on the farm rich and gratifying, as this book of charming recollections demonstrates. Although he is describing a kind of life that has almost vanished, his tone is not elegiac but alive with remembered happiness. . . . [He] writes with something of a poet鈥檚 feeling for the special qualities that made life on the farm so intense an experience.鈥濃擥ranville Hicks, New York Times Sunday Book Review
鈥滺ow this man can write. Harnack reminds us that one of the glories of our sometimes dubious species is language.鈥濃Philadelphia Inquirer
