Author Gene Logsdon-whom Wendell Berry once called "the most experienced and best observer of agriculture we have"-has a notion: That it is a little easier for gardeners and farmers to accept death than the rest of the populace. Why? Because every day, farmers and gardeners help plants and animals begin life and help plants and animals end life. They are intimately attuned to the food chain. They understand how all living things are seated around a dining table, eating while being eaten. They realize that all of nature is in flux.
Gene Everlasting contains Logsdon's reflections, by turns both humorous and heart-wrenching, on nature, death, and eternity, all from a contrary farmer's perspective. He recounts joys and tragedies from his childhood in the 1930s and '40s spent on an Ohio farm, through adulthood and child-raising, all the way up to his recent bout with cancer, always with an eye toward the lessons that farming has taught him about life and its mysteries.
Whether his subject is parsnips, pigweed, immortality, irises, green burial, buzzards, or compound interest, Logsdon generously applies as much heart and wit to his words as he does care and expertise to his fields. "In a prolific career stretching back to the early 1970s, Logsdon has penned hundreds of farm and garden articles, four novels, and nearly two dozen nonfiction books on topics ranging from cutting wood to managing manure. Now entering his ninth decade, Logsdon turns his attention here to his own, and everyone else's, unavoidable demise. In 21 contemplative and often trenchantly witty essays, the author ruminates over a wide variety of religious and materialistic ideas about death and finds the greatest comfort in the notion that, when his body returns to the soil, it will provide sustenance for new life. Logsdon praises the contemporary trend toward burials in biodegradable caskets and takes a jaundiced view of beliefs in a blissful, never-ending afterlife."-Booklist
"Logsdon (A Sanctuary of Trees) blends careful observations of the natural world with sometimes humorous, often melancholic contemplations that gently lead the reader to ponder such topics as the death of a beloved pet, the mysterious nature of cemeteries, the number of suicides in any given year, butchering hogs, buzzards in the backyard and the sudden uptick in backyard farms and gardens. He expertly intertwines these seemingly disconnected subjects with the cyclic qualities of nature and the overall sense that life and death are forever paired―that one cannot and should not exist without the other, thereby removing the fear of death.
Logsdon also eloquently reveals early childhood memories and his fears of the meaning of everlasting hell, his acceptance of his mother's untimely death and his own need to confront death when diagnosed with cancer. The culminating effect is not morbid, but philosophical and absorbing, like a musical fugue that builds and recedes, gracefully moving toward an acceptance and understanding of what living and dying truly mean."-Shelf Awareness, Starred Review
"Dryly humorous, intelligently original, and at times poetic, Logsdon (A Sanctuary of Trees) muses and wisecracks about cycles of life and death, nature's resilience, and humanity's follies from the rolling hills and changing seasons of his farm in Sandusky, Ohio, just steps from where he grew up, as he finds himself still alive after a bout with cancer...Great bedtime reading, these succinct, thought-provoking, life-affirming essays are a perfect gift for your favorite gardener, nature lover, philosopher, or curmudgeon."-Publishers Weekly
"Wisdom and experience permeate this perceptive and understatedly well-written meditation."-Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review Over the course of his long life and career as a writer, farmer, and journalist, Gene Logsdon published more than two dozen books, both practical and philosophical, on all aspects of rural life and affairs
