A classic work of natural history is once again available in a paper edition.
A book about a time gone by, about family, about growing up -- storytelling and descriptive nature writing at its best.
The great naturalist, Edwin Way Teale, spent his boyhood holidays and summers at his grandparents' farm, Lone Oak, in Indiana. In Dune Boy, first published in 1943, he recounts these buccolic visits and his budding interest in the natural world around him. A loner, often bullied by other children, Teale escaped to the roof of the old house where he gazed at the golden dunes in the distance, and dreamed his own fantastic dreams.
The young Teale was fascinated by moths, dragonflies, snakes, and the workings of the farm. He yearned to fly. He tried to hitch a calf to a cart, to ride a pig. He created a "museum" for his collections of arrowheads, stones, and fish skeletons. Most of all, he enjoyed his storytelling, hardworking grandfather, and his book-reading, equally hardworking grandmother. They reveled in and encouraged him. He returned to Lone Oak every summer until he was fifteen, when the old farm house caught fire and burned down.
From the Book:
"In the widest sense, A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm depicts a human need to belong to a piece of earth and, for the naturalist, to learn it, to try to understand it. The bountifulness of Trail Wood enveloped Edwin and Nellie in peace. Trail Wood was more than a plot of ground, it was a world that they wrapped around their shoulders to keep out the chill . . . [This book] is a classical understanding of man’s need to have a stable base, a place to protect and to celebrate, a place to go out from but always to come home to. Knowing how and why this land came into their possession helps us to understand the tremendous meaning that it held for [them], the incredible beauty not only of this land but the whole earth upon which they lived . . . A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm is a guidebook to contentment, a how-to book on living well and lightly on the land." -- from the Foreword
