cover image Preservation

Preservation

Peter Svenson. Faber & Faber, $21.95 (190pp) ISBN 978-0-571-19840-5

Svenson follows Battlefield: Farming a Civil War Battlefield with a general reflection on why societies and individuals choose to memorialize certain things and sacrifice others. The author integrates this with a memoir of his rootless childhood and an adult life described as ``anchorless'' until he discovered his battlefield farm in Virginia and fought to save it from 20th-century challenges--especially highways. Paving, Svenson asserts, is killing. Farming is life. Chapters on Svenson's school days, college experience and hitch in the Navy are conventional in comparison with his lyrical descriptions of making hay and debating the pros and cons of herbicides. A refreshing story of a person who has established personal equilibrium in a society that persists in making whirl its king. (June)