During Wind and Rain

The Jones Family Farm in the Arkansas Delta, 1848-2006

By: Margaret Jones Bolsterli

Narrated by: Mindy Grall

In telling the story of five generations of her family and its farm in the Arkansas Delta, Margaret Jones Bolsterli brings together her own research, historical perspective, and family lore as it reaches her from the days of her great-grandfather down to her nephew. The result is a family saga that is at once universal and personal, historical, and timeless. During Wind and Rain moves from the land's acquisition in 1848 through the Civil War and Reconstruction, the 1927 Flood, the Great Depression, and the drought of 1930 to the modern considerations of mechanization, fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation. The transformation of dense swamp and forest to today's commercial agriculture is the story of two hundred acres worked by people sowing their fate with sweat, ingenuity, and luck. From the hoes of Bolsterli's great-grandfather Uriah's time to her nephew Casey's machinery capable of cultivating an acre in five minutes, During Wind and Rain poignantly portrays five generations of farmers motivated by dreams of "a crop so good that the memory of it can warm the drafty floors of adversity for the rest of one's life."

The book is published by The University of Arkansas Press.

©2008 The University of Arkansas Press (P)2016 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"The romance, foolhardiness, and grit that define farming and the American agrarian dream come charging to life in this loving but realistic account of one family, one Arkansas delta farm from the Civil War to the present.'" (Jo McDougall, author of Dirt and Towns Facing Railroads)

"In a voice both elegant and wise, this native daughter, returned to a Delta world transformed almost but not quite beyond recognition, recounts what was lost and gained by those who over many generations made a life as well as a living from this ground." (Rural Women's Studies Association)

"This volume will be read with much pleasure and great profit." (Willard Gatewood, co-editor of The Arkansas Delta: Land of Paradox)