Farm Friends

"I've been a Tom Fels fan for years. He writes beautifully because he thinks with powerful clarity. This book--a journey, an elegy, an investigation--touches the soul of an era and, at day's end, the aching, searching American heart."

—Ron Suskind, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author of The Price of Loyalty, The One Percent Doctrine, and A Hope in the Unseen

Foreword by Carl Oglesby

A memoir of farms, cities, war, peace, and the timeless march of life.

Farm Friends is a memoir and a study of the generation of the 1960s. Beginning on a communal farm in 1969, it continues as a personal chronicle of the author and his extended family up to the present day.

From the greenhouse in the spring to haying in the summer; from cold, wood-heated winters to abundant home-cooked dinners in the fall, back-to-the-land communards of the late '60s and early '70s made their way in a new and unfamiliar world. Later, relocated in cities and towns across the country, they used what they had learned to continue to explore and to influence life as they found it in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

What sort of individuals did the rebellious and anti-establishment youth become? How much of their idealism did they retain in the coming decades, as many of them were pulled into mainstream and urban life? Farm Friends is readable history on the human scale, formed of stories interwoven into an ongoing narrative that suggests the fabric of an entire generation. From cow pasture to San Francisco, Farm Friends spans nearly fifty years and inspires reassessment of a complex generation.