For additional reading, consider Suggested Readings for Adults; Suggested Readings for Children.

For more information on the agriculture history and heritage of Santa Clara Valley, visit Silicon Valley History Online or Heritage Council of Santa Clara County [www.historymonth.org]

SUGGESTED READING FOR ADULTS:

The librarians at the Santa Clara County Library have compiled a list of other books you might want to read if you enjoyed Epitaph for a Peach.

Four Seasons in Five Senses: Things Worth Savoring by David Mas Masumoto
The color of weeds, the smell of mud, the sound of a shovel in soil, the feel of work boots, the taste of a peach.

Harvest Son: Planting Roots in American Soil by David Mas Masumoto
Masumoto offers a tribute to family, farm, and community.

PrairyErth by William Least Heat-Moon
Heat-Moon delves deep into the heartland in this exploration of Chase County, Kansas, home of the last American tall-grass prairie. He explores people and place, history and natural history, geology and ecology, in this massive and moving paean to the Great Plains.

Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck
Steinbeck and his dog Charley set off across America in a camper in 1960. This classic Steinbeck explores and describes the people and places of the country.

A Country Year by Sue Hubbell
Sue Hubbell lives alone on a 100-acre farm in the Ozarks, where she keeps bees, makes honey, and chronicles the natural world around her.

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
First published in 1962, this is the classic book that alerted the world to the dangers of pesticides. Carson loves nature and her lyrical writing is still relevant today.

Insect Lives edited by Erich Hoyt and Ted Schultz
This is a collection of essays by on insects and how humans have perceived them, lived with them, hated them, and admired them. Writers include Charles Darwin on sea-going insects, Thoreau on race wars among the ants, Edward O. Wilson on insect societies, and Dave Barry on naming the U.S. National Insect.

Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
Do plants use humans as much as we use them? Pollan takes a look at the world from the perspective of four plants: apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes.

On Good Land: The Autobiography of an Urban Farm by Michael Ableman
With sensitivity and wit, Ableman recounts the 15 years he has spent developing Fairview Gardens, as he learned to operate an organic farm, countered community opposition, and ultimately gained widespread support.

Homestead Year: Back to the Land in Suburbia by Judith Moffett
Moffett, an English professor and science fiction author, took a year-long sabbatical to become as self-sufficient as possible on her one-acre yard in suburban Philadelphia. Using a journal format, she chronicles the work involved in establishing her garden, fish pond, beehives, and duck pen.

The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of a Lost Job and a Life Found by Don Snyder.
Snyder lost his teaching job, and eventually found work as a construction worker. Along the way, he let go of old illusions, learned new skills, and found a new way of looking at life.

Plain and Simple: A Woman’s Journey to the Amish by Sue Bender.
Bender tells the story of how she lived with Amish families and learned to simplify her life.

On All Sides Nowhere: Building a Life in Rural Idaho by William Gruber
Gruber bought an abandoned log cabin and its surrounding forty acres in Alder Creek, a town considered small even by Idaho standards. But farm living was far from the bucolic wonderland he expected: he now had to rise with the sun to finish strenuous chores, cope with the lack of modern conveniences, and shed his urban pretensions to become a real local.

The Orchard: A Memoir by Adele Crockett Robertson
In this beautiful and poignant memoir, a young woman single-handedly struggles to save her New England farm in the depths of the Great Depression.

Here and Nowhere Else : Late Seasons of a Farm and Its Family by Jane Brox.
Brox writes of going back to the farm where she grew up, to help her aging father and the troubled brother who works the land with him. She memorably captures the cadences of farm life and the people who sustain it, at a time when both are waning.

A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm by Stanley Crawford
Crawford and his wife settled outside Santa Fe and learned to grow and sell garlic.

Waiting for Rain: A Farmer's Story by Dan Butterworth.
Butterworth tells the story of a North Carolina farmer named Archie Clare, telling the events of the dry summer of 1986 that ends with Archie deciding to quit farming.

Cutting Hill : A Chronicle of a Family Farm by Alan Pistorius.
Four seasons on a 350-acre Vermont dairy farm.

Farm : A Year in the Life of an American Farmer by Richard Rhodes.
Rhodes lyrically recounts a year in the lives of Tom and Sally Bauer, solid Midwesterners who work the bottomlands of the Missouri River to grow "a harvest few city people could have identified ... the foundation of their diet, the principal food plant of the Western world": corn.

Third Person Rural: Further Essays of a Sometime Farmer by Noel Perrin.
Perrin’s tales of life on a Vermont farm.

OTHER RESOURCES:

• Silicon Valley History Online
  Approximately 1,000 historic photographs, manuscripts and other images of Santa Clara Valley history can now be accessed online at www.SiliconValleyHistory.org.