by Charles Prowell (Author)
A Faulknerian, poetic spell of intrigue, bravado, melancholy and humor set in a long-forgotten corner of southern Illinois. A farming community of Amish and Anabaptists in-breeding for 160 years told in the first-person narrative of Justus Roe, who recollects from his aging years to recount an eighteen-month span of record-breaking seasons from his youth. Officially a generational planting log, we live and experience the mother's declining health alongside the threat to the community's vanishing culture while witnessing the father's culminating research and mysterious travails toward the world's first hybrid corn seed and genetically modified crops, naively guarding his altruistic intentions of feeding an increasingly hungry world from the aggressions of pre-war and post-war administrations determined to capitalize at any cost.