Books Briefly
Books Briefly Minnesota Americana LAKE WOBEGON DAYS by Garrison Keillor The Viking Press. 337 pp. $17.95. Regular listeners to Garrison Keillor's public radio show, "A Prairie Home Companion,"...
...Americana at its best...
...And most members of Congressional agricultural committees are serenely uninformed about the "business" of agriculture...
...Food and Forgotten Farms THE POLITICS OF FOOD by Joel Solkoff Sierra Club Books...
...As "agribusiness" took over, USDA staff officials, whose careers were spent in studying subsidies and parity, seemed often at a loss when confronted with complex international forces that the "free market" presented—global food shortages, say, or U.S.Soviet grain, deals...
...It has been decades since the nation's farmers constituted a significant segment of the voting population and Congress regarded farm issues as vitally important...
...Joel Solkoff, an accomplished investigative journalist, explores his complicated subject in depth, including such activities as trading in futures and commodities...
...Agricultural policies have been left more and more to bureaucrats and specialists...
...Keillor knows human frailties and small town life, and his musings are often hilarious, sometimes sad, occasionally vulgar, and always human...
...Ideology often plays only a minor role...
...President Jimmy Carter campaigned to give higher payments to farmers, then tried to limit them...
...Regular listeners to Garrison Keillor's public radio show, "A Prairie Home Companion," can meet everyone in the quiet Minnesota town in the pages of Lake Wobegon Days, from Ralph of Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery and Dorothy of the Chatterbox Cafe and Wally Bunsen of the Sidetrack Tap to the Krebsbachs, the sleepwalking Lundbergs, and the Tollefsons...
...Department of Agriculture (USDA) was the fourth largest Government agency although only 4.5 per cent of our population lived on farms...
...His disturbing and finally pessimistic book is as much about the byzantine political processes of a "free-market" economy as it is about food...
...In 1972, the U.S...
...In this sprawling hodgepodge of a book, Keillor rambles through the town's history, its Norwegian and German immigrants, religious worship, sports, public school, and, most of all, the minutiae of daily living, from planting tomatoes to mounting storm windows...
...238 pp...
...Ronald Reagan campaigned for a market-oriented policy, then created the most expensive program in history for paying farmers not to produce...
Vol. 50 • January 1986 • No. 1
