Rural category: 418 books

What kind of people would you meet if you decided to walk across the world's most populous country? The Great Walk of China is a journey into China's heartland, away from its surging coastal cities. Through surprisingly frank conversations with the people he meets along the way, the Chinese-speaking...

England has a housing crisis. We need to build many more new homes to house our growing population, but house building is controversial, particularly when it involves the loss of countryside. Addressing both sides of this critical debate, Shaun Spiers argues that to drive house building on the scale...

First published in 1972, The Foxfire Book was a surprise bestseller that brought Appalachia's philosophy of simple living to hundreds of thousands of readers. Whether you wanted to hunt game, bake the old-fashioned way, or learn the art of successful moonshining, The Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center...

Noise is usually defined as unwanted sound: loud music from a neighbor, the honk of a taxicab, the roar of a supersonic jet. But as Garret Keizer illustrates in this probing examination, noise is as much about what we want as about what we seek to avoid. It has been a byproduct of human striving since...

In the tradition of his well-loved The Outermost House, Henry Beston's Northern Farm captures "the elusive magic of a year on a Kennebee farm...in truly beautiful prose" (Kirkus Reviews). Among the blue-white shadows and graceful curves of freshly fallen snow, the first rains of spring,...

Fracking is one of the most controversial methods of fossil fuel extraction in the United States, but a great deal about it remains out of the public eye. In Wisconsin it has ignited an unprecedented explosion in the state’s sand mining operations, an essential ingredient in hydraulic fracturing...

They travel the roads on a warm summer day, enjoying the summer breeze as they take in scenery along the way. Driving past woods and fields bordering rustic country roads, they raise their hands from time to time to acknowledge both neighbors and strangers, but most times they are lost in conversation...

At the age of seven, Loren Schmidtberger was assigned to a beginner's cow—the gentlest cow in the herd and the easiest for a child just beginning to milk. As he learned to milk with the help of the cow, he also learned the art of living from the unforgiving reality of the Dust Bowl years tempered by...

In today’s ever-busy, every-hurrying world, it’s easy to yearn for slower, simpler times. Life in the old days was hard and far from idyllic, but the people were hard-working, honest, and honorable. In his book, Communities and Communion in the Texas Hill Country, author Paul Primrose offers memories,...

In this final volume of the beloved American saga that began with All Over but the Shoutin’ and continued with Ava’s Man, Rick Bragg closes his circle of family stories with an unforgettable tale about fathers and sons inspired by his own relationship with his ten-year-old stepson. He learns,...

We were going down the road, and we came to this house. There was a little boy standing by the road just crying and crying. We stopped, and we heard the biggest racket you ever heard up in the house. œWhat ™s the matter, son?  œWhy, Maw and Paw are up there fightin ™.  œWho is your Paw,...

In 1977, Laura Bell, at loose ends after graduating from college, leaves her family home in Kentucky for a wild and unexpected adventure: herding sheep in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin. Inexorably drawn to this life of solitude and physical toil, a young woman in a man’s world, she is perhaps the strangest...

"One of the stories I tell myself when I am trying to fall asleep is that I have tried. I've tagged along after myself in the pages of my own modern Western, and every few years is another chapter to the story. The myth of the cowboy. I chased a dream and it kicked me in the teeth. Yet I find myself...

Among the most pervasive of stereotypes imposed upon southern highlanders is that they were white, opposed slavery, and supported the Union before and during the Civil War, but the historical record suggests far different realities. John C. Inscoe has spent much of his scholarly career exploring the...