Mark Twain Made Me Do It and Other Plains Adventures is a collection of humorous essays portraying western Nebraska life and culture of the 1950s. Anecdotes on small-town baseball and the polio epidemic of 1952 provide a historic backdrop to the story of a wide-eyed boy exploring the limits of his universe. The adventures of a Twain-inspired raft trip down the South Platte and Sputnik-inspired homemade rockets mirror a society of seemingly settled lifestyles and frenzied technological advances. Family travels, holidays with Grandpa and Grandma, and marvelous creations like his sister’s stories of Susabelle and the magic Band-Aids weave a splendid tale. But Jones’s world is not one of sentimental nostalgia; running battles with town bullies, sobering encounters with religious buffoons, and an impressive collection of pedagogues specializing in violent corporal punishment capture the earthy essence of a world now largely disappeared.
In cantankerous opinions, hard-headed advice, and free-swinging sketches of real farmers, Bryan Jones addresses everyone who feels the pull of the land. He accepts the emotional appeal of "going back to the land" and then takes the unconventional stand that, above all, farming can be a good way to make money. Against the grain of public policy that, he maintains, encourages big agriculture, Jones works out how a shrewd, stubborn small farmer can still make a go of it. His keen-eyed sketches of farmers at work show the variety of ways a farmer may succeed or fail. Even his own neighborhood, dominated by thousands of acres of corn and high technology, is peopled with "scalper" who makes a living in the cattle business with little more stake than a gooseneck trailer, a telephone, and his native wits; the sheep man who secretly grows rich while looking poor and raising an animal that other farmer disdain; the experimenter who never turns a nickel himself, but whose successful innovations are readily adopted by his neighbors; the hog raiser who makes a large family pay. The heart of the book is the primer for novices--and for city folk who dream of farming. Jones emphasizes the practicalities of farm finance and recommends sidelines for the beginner--welding, giving guitar lessons, keeping the books for a local elevator--as an alternative to starving. He urges newcomers to start small and to be sure that farming is something they really want to do. To interested bystanders, The Farming Game offers one farmer's audacious, stimulating, and entertaining view of American agriculture today.
Mr. Bryan's unfinished memoirs, which close with an account of the Baltimore convention of 1912, make up less than half the volume. Mrs. Bryan then takes up the tale. She traces some of the steps in his career, going back to his student days, and fills out the unfinished record with an account of his life in Washington and his later years.
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