Country Acres: Country Wisdom for the Working Landscape

This is a visually fabulous coffee-table book about livestock, barns, trees, fields, vegetables, and farming implements. It's sort of a photographic companion to "Charlotte's Web." Rural life has never looked so gorgeous as it does in this book. There are no people in this countryside, no grime, and certainly no dead cars or junk in yards or on sagging porches. (Caution to carnivores: Once you have studied the beautiful and soulful farm animals and their young, you will not want to eat meat again.) Barns, birch trees, fences, snow -- everything is perfect. This is a strange book, one that idealizes the Northeast countryside so powerfully that it's a little strange, really. Best enjoyed by city slickers.