Rudy Wiebe
A beautiful, moving memoir of a boyâ€™s coming of age, infused with a deep love of the land, from one of Canadaâ€™s most cherished and acclaimed writers.,In ,Of This Earth,, Rudy Wiebe gives vivid life again to the vanished world of Speedwell, Saskatchewan, an isolated, poplar-forested, mostly Mennonite community â€“ and Rudyâ€™s first home. Too young to do heavy work, Rudy witnessed a way of life that was soon to disappear. And we experience with him the hard labour of clearing the stony, silty bushland; the digging out of precious wells one bucket of dirt at a time; sorrow at the death of a beloved sister; the disorienting searches for grazing cattle in the vast wilderness sloughs and the sweet discovery of the power of reading.,Rare personal photographs (reproduced throughout the book) and the fragile memories of those who are left give shape to the story of Mennonite immigrants building a life in Canada, the growth and decline of the small Speedwell community, the sway of religion, and a young boyâ€™s growing love of the extreme beauty of the aspen forests â€“ as well as how all these elements came to inform his destiny as a writer.,A hymn to a lost place and a distant time, ,Of This Earth, follows the best of memoirs in the tradition of Sharon Butalaâ€™s ,The Perfection of the Morning, and W. G. Sebaldâ€™s ,Austerlitz,. It is an evocation of the Canadian west that only a writer of Rudy Wiebeâ€™s powers could summon.,From the Hardcover edition.
Autobiography,Memoir,Nonfiction,Biography,History,Cultural,Canada,Religion,Literature,Canadian Literature
Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest