After posting my review of Geld's book, I read the review written by an unnamed person in the Publishers Weekly. This reviewer read a different book from the one I did, or worse chose only to skim it, with the thought of writing from their own biased understanding of Brazil. I would be willing to wager that this reviewer has never set foot on a farm nor taken the time to understand a country as big and diverse as the U. S.

The reviewer obviously wanted Geld to delve into the ecological problems of developing in the Amazon River basin and discards completely Gelds questioning of the long term issues related to development in the Amazon River basin. Geld very interestingly compared development in Parana, which she witnessed when she first arrived in Brazil, with what she saw occurring in the Amazon.

The political realities of agrarian reform are also lost on the reviewer. Several times in the book Geld explained how politicians in their attempt to improve conditions for small farmers, often complicate and hinder proper development of land. Geld's description of the small farmer who couldn't get title to his land, because the government was concerned that title would allow him to sell his land, but resulted in him not being able to borrow money to properly improve the land was but one example of her understanding and admirable description of these complex issues. Geld's quote of her father, "Poor people make poor soil," is very appropriate.

Your comment, "...parallels between the rich Ohio agrarian society of her youth and the subtropical poverty of a Brazilian farm economy", is laughable. I have visited Louis Bromfield's Malabar Farms twice in the past ten years and can tell you that the surrounding farms are anything but rich. Due to the diligence and innovative farming practices of her father, he slowly turned a run-down Depression era farm into a marvelous, model, working farm. Brazil's agricultural economy is far from poverty, as the country is rapidly overtaking the U. S. in farm production and productivity. This unnamed reviewers comments reflect either ignorance or some other hidden political agenda...

Ellen Bromfield Geld's new book View From the Fazenda is a delightful chronicle of her life as an immigrant to Brazil in 1961 up through today. She and her entrepreneurial husband Carson moved to Brazil as bright newlyweds, but without many material things other than the clothes on their backs. After several jobs on ranches, they accumulated enough funds to buy a small farm of 240 acres. Unlike most typical Brazilian farmers who lived in town, the Gelds quickly built a small house, making it the focal point for the recreation from a monoculture coffee farm into a diversified model. Showing a true love of the land Geld, writes of the many conservation innovations they bring to the farm with terracing, crop rotations and other ecologically friendly improvements.

Her travels throughout Brazil are interesting and well told. The best are her experiences in the fragile Amazon in Alta Floresta; Riding the riverboat on the River Sao Francisco; and the beauty of the relatively unknown Plantanal. She vividly describes the wonders she encounters in these sparsely populated, wild west areas of Brazil. While explaining these new areas, she also expresses her uneasiness and concern with how development is occurring in many of these areas relating them to the older areas of Parana that she saw develop when she first arrived in Brazil.

Several of her stories in the book are particularly humorous. Two of the better ones are how she has to show a group of Brazilian tourists that an American motel is not paid for by the hour and her experience of riding the Brazilian equivalent to the Orient Express.

Her forty year experience of adapting to a new country, raising a family of five children (all of whom study abroad but return to Brazil), and seeing the changes that occur over forty years is extremely interesting. It brought to mind what my ancestors might have faced when they came to the U. S. several generations ago to begin a new life as farmers in a very strange land.

I started the book over a weekend and couldn't put it down. It is highly recommended.

The 1920's through the 1940's were prime time for literature and the most popular authors of this period included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck and Louis Bromfield.

Louis who?

Although Mr. Bromfield's novels never earned the long-term respect that was anointed on authors as Steinbeck or Hemingway, his story is as interesting as that of any author who lived during the twentieth century.

He was one of the group of writers whose skills were honed in France in the roaring 20's (like Hemingway, he served as an ambulance drive in World War 1). He enjoyed critical and considerable financial success as a novelist. He won the Pulitzer at a young age for the novel Early Autumn. Several of his novels were adapted for the big screen. He was an adventurer, world traveler, pal to the rich and famous.

But in the midst of this success, deep down he longed to return to the farmland near where he grew up in Mansfield, Ohio. A farmer at heart, he became one of America's most influential and revered conservationists after he founded Malabar Farm near Mansfield. After his death, the farm and the "Big House" ' a marvelous home if ever there was one ' were purchased by the state of Ohio and remain one of the state's most popular tourist attractions.

Mr. Bromfield was hardly the stereotype of a farmer. While he loved to get his boots as muddy as any sodbuster, he also maintained the grand social lifestyle that he and his wife Mary had cultivated in France. The "Big House" was constantly filled with thirty or more guests. At any one time, it would host movie stars such as Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall (who were married at the house), New York Socialites, writers as E.B. White and Inez Robb, farmers from overseas, and of course the children and a platoon of slobbering Boxers.

Mr. Bromfield loved to be surrounded by compelling and conversational people almost as much as he enjoyed being surrounded by the lush and bountiful fields of Malabar Farm. Both fed him.

It was a life was well lived, and his loving daughter does a fine job of capturing the mystique, the paradox and, yes, the weaknesses of her larger than life dad.

Louis who?

If you don't know, you'll be better for finding out through this eloquent, entertaining and insightful memoir by Mrs. Geld.