Reading David Masumoto's Epitaph for a Peach changed the way I viewed peaches. While I always liked peaches, Masumoto's passion for peaches elevated them to the top of the fruit ladder. However, I felt that he had reached the end of that genre. How much more was there to say about peaches and peach growing? I was wrong. Four Seasons and Five Senses is a wonderful book which deepens my affection of peaches and enhances my knowledge of the process.

He has grown so much as a writer since Epitaph for a Peach. He's able to bring to life the love of farming, the excitement about organic peaches, the anxieties about the market and weather, the sensuality of eating luscious fruit, the uncertainty of prices, and the difficulty of the labor. He breaks the stereotype of ignorant farmers. He connects peach farming with such diverse subjects as chamber music, migrant labor, and entomology.

I did not want the book to end.

Having tasted Masumoto's peaches also helps for they truly are amazing. I recommend the book to anyone who appreciates good food, wants to know about the experience of organic farming, and is interested in whole process of getting a peach to market.

Reading David Masumoto's Epitaph for a Peach changed the way I viewed peaches. While I always liked peaches, Masumoto's passion for peaches elevated them to the top of the fruit ladder. However, I felt that he had reached the end of that genre. How much more was there to say about peaches and peach growing? I was wrong. Four Seasons and Five Senses is a wonderful book which deepens my affection of peaches and enhances my knowledge of the process.

He has grown so much as a writer since Epitaph for a Peach. He's able to bring to life the love of farming, the excitement about organic peaches, the anxieties about the market and weather, the sensuality of eating luscious fruit, the uncertainty of prices, and the difficulty of the labor. He breaks the stereotype of ignorant farmers. He connects peach farming with such diverse subjects as chamber music, migrant labor, and entomology.

I did not want the book to end.

Having tasted Masumoto's peaches also helps for they truly are amazing. I recommend the book to anyone who appreciates good food, wants to know about the experience of organic farming, and is interested in whole process of getting a peach to market.

When David Mas Masumoto describes how his "old-fashioned" Sun Crest peaches look and taste, the reader's mouth waters and the grocery store peaches of today become flavorless by comparison. When Masumoto is unable to find buyers for his peaches he describes them as "homeless" and the reader's heart grieves. This book strongly conveys the small family farmer's ties to the land and his crops, his lack of control before the forces of nature and the whims of market dynamics. It also taught me a few things about the hard work involved in farming. However, when I look back for a "soundbite" impression of this book, I get a series of poetic pictures: Masumoto's obaachan (grandmother) walking through the farm at sunset, cruel bulldozers ripping out an orchard, graceful egrets fishing in the irrigation canals. A great read for a taste of connection to the land!

Lush, fragrant peaches dangling from the branches in David Mas Masumoto's orchard long to be picked and enjoyed for the burst of nector that surrounds your tastebuds. The prose is as delicious as the organic fruit that this farm struggles to produce as we read of the everyday joys and hardships of saving a farm and a way of life. And yes, I even ran out and bought Sun Crest peaches at the Farmer's Market after reading this book!

It is rare to read a book where the author works miracles with his hands and his words. I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys non-fiction but finds it dry, without humanity. David Mas Masumoto is anything but dry. His land may be at times, but his poetic prose is anything but. His relationship with his family, his family's farm and nature is a rare combination. I highly recommend this read.

This book is filled with quite a bit of overly purple prose, and strikes me as very self-consciously "literary."

There is some good nature writing in here, I suppose, but only when you allow for the ridiculous number of grammatical mistakes and the awkward and often mixed metaphors. If Masumoto can't handle subject/predicate agreement, should he really be writing a novel?

A third generation Japanese-American, agriculturist David Masumoto farms peaches and raisins. He celebrates nature, savoring seasons when "The air is filled with the smell of drying grapes - a caramel fragrance mixed with an earthy aroma."

He is a champion of hard work, viewing calluses as "badges of honor earned only after years in the fields,...The hands tell a story of worth..."

And, as evidenced in his affecting memoir, Harvest Son, he is an author whose fluid pen scrolls as gracefully as kanji, the ancient Japanese script in which each word is a picture. Evocative descriptions of abundant harvests and the delicately limned shade of a near-ripe peach are lyric testimony that farming is not only his occupation, it is his modus vivendi.

Writing with spare yet lustrous precision, Mr. Masumoto traces his life's journey in flashbacks, exploring the past to chart his future. Having learned that in 1942 his grandparents, along with some 16,000 Japanese-Americans were relocated to internment camps, Mr. Masumoto embarked on a painful quest, searching the Arizona desert for traces of the Gila River Relocation Center, his family's four-year home. "A few low cement pillars sunken into the ground" and "a pile of broken thick white dishes" were the only remnants of those interrupted lives.

Another pilgrimage was to Japan, where he found his grandmother's brother. Held hostage by rice paddies, his uncle's farmhouse "looked like the face of an old man with wrinkles and age spots." The floor was of packed earth..." But, blessings of all blessings, there was the "ofuro" or Japanese hot tub, which "Following a day in the fields, ...tempered worn and broken spirits. The soothing water fostered a benevolence and a feeling of optimism."

Mr. Masumoto eventually returned to the California valley of his childhood, where he found satisfaction and a connectedness in tending the vines planted by his grandfathers. From the author we learn a Japanese word "shoganai" meaning "it can't be helped." This is a word borne of forbearance, we are told, as despite their painful past Japanese-Americans accepted their new country "with a bow of humility. Not weakness but silent strength."

When a surprise hailstorm destroyed what promised to be a bumper crop, Mr. Masumoto asked himself why he continued to farm. His answer may be "shoganai."

Today, Mr. Masumoto is a leader in his local Buddhist community, one of the few sansei or third generation Japanese-Americans who remain in the farmland that nurtured them. It is left to him to serve as chairman at many funerals, as one generation honors another. Harvest Son is a joyful, poignant reminder that it is both duty and privilege to do so.

After reading EPITAPH FOR A PEACH, I hungrily hunted down HARVEST SON. This is nature writing at it's finest! At once a touching and poetic account of family life on an organic peach farm and vineyard. The reader is likely to run the gamut of emotions as Masumoto describes losing a crop of peaches to a damaging and wicked storm, makes a pilgrimmage to Japan to learn of his family's history and culture, or has a blast while fertilizing young peach trees "by hand" - his wife and son riding with him on the back of a wagon throwing organic fertilizer at the trees with old coffee cans. His 10 year old daughter jerks them along as she learns to drive the tractor. HARVEST SON is a warm, funny and insightful book that will not disappoint!