Books, Arts & Manners: How We’re Gonna Keep ’Em

Farm: A Year in the Life of an American Farmer, by Richard Rhodes (Simon & Schuster, 336 pp., $19.95)

America was once an overwhelmingly rural nation, its heart the family farm, and today, although mostly urban, the nation still feels the pull of its agrarian origins. Indeed, city dwellers desperately seek new means to teach their children the values that came naturally from rural life: self-reliance and independence, honesty and industry, family and community.