In a Pickle: A Family Farm Story

Like an earlier reviewer, I'll look for more books from Jerry Apps. My mother's dad was a farmer in Iowa. They moved to "The Valley" in Texas (near Brownsville) when she was 14 and then to NW Arkansas before she graduated from high school. In all three areas, my grandad farmed. When I was a child, he milked a few cows and put his 10-gallon milk cans out at the rural train station for pick-up each day. He worked at the local BUSH canning plant part-time to supplement his farming income. My grandmother was a grade school teacher until she retired. This novel helped me to understand more about my family history and some of the challenges that must have been faced by my grandparents. This story is good food for thought.

Jerry Apps zeroes in on the importance of the small family farm in the community and the challenges that are facing the farmers and their families. I enjoyed getting drawn into the story of the pickle factory and its importance as a source of income and gathering place. You will look at pickles differently after reading this book. I live in Wisconsin but never knew about the role small cucumber patches played in the life of the farm areas. Buy local, support the family farmers and help them creatively survive the challenge of agribusiness.

No need to repeat Jim Pope's comments. I like books like these as a nice "break" from the "murder & mayhem" novels I usually read. Very nice and informative book, indeed. I'll be looking for more of Jerry Apps' works.

Novels are typically not on my 'to read' shelf. But I picked this one up because Apps' non-fiction has always been so much fun and chocked full of right-on memories for me. IN A PICKLE is about the time when I grew up and about a place only half-a-county from where my family's farm was. This book is right up there as one of Apps' best, and it superbly captures the essence of the culture and the times. It tells an engaging story in a down-home and straightforward style that shows why Apps should be on everybody's list of really good storytellers. The book is a character-driven tale that's not only a fun read, but it will give you an effective insight into what small-farm life was really like half-a-century ago in middle America. After the first couple of chapters of IN A PICKLE, I found it to be one of those few books that is so enjoyable that I forcibly (and with difficulty) limited myself to just a chapter or two a day - that way I knew I would get to enjoy it for a lot longer. The book has several layers to it: 1) an enjoyable novel about the relationships of a cast of characters trying to get through tough times together, 2) a chronicle of small farm families documenting some of the everyday realities of that life fifty years ago, 3) a commentary on how progress in the big picture of things can impact the lives of the individual people being swept through those changes, and 4) a depiction of how the modernization of technology can be a good thing, but how, whether it intends to or not, and for better or for worse, it can significantly disrupt the traditional order of things and much of what goes with that tradition. Those aspects can all be enjoyed on their own merits with IN A PICKLE. But the book also gives the reader a combined experience of all those things fitting together in one place and one period of the American landscape, an indispensable part of our country's character. If you're old enough, IN A PICKLE will jog your memory about the old days and tickle your funny bone at the same time. If you're younger than that, the book takes you back in time to a part of your parents' world, and it does that in an entertaining way that leaves you appreciating some new things about that world your folks grew up in. In either case, you're apt to see some things in a way that you maybe hadn't considered before - until Jerry Apps let you know about it with IN A PICKLE.