Featuring Local Authors & Regional Interests
Hudson Valley Bookshelf

"Farm & Marketry": A Primer for Saving Local Agriculture
by Rosemary Fox

Book review of Hudson Valley Harvest: A Food-Lover's Guide to Farms, Restaurants, and Open-Air Markets, by Jan Greenberg. The Countryman Press. 272 pages, photos, paperback, $18.95. Available June, 2003 from local booksellers or from 800-245-4151.

Award-winning food writer Jan Greenberg's intent in creating this book was edifyingly two-fold. First, to empower Hudson Valley residents and visitors to easily purchase top-quality, locally grown edibles while having adventurous jaunts. Second, to educate readers on the connection between the business of farming and the sustainability of this scenic, historically rich area: An area fewer than one hundred miles from the minimally natural, maximally-processed city and its sprawling "burbs."

A long-time resident of both New York City and the Hudson Valley, Jan Greenberg is well qualified to enlighten us on what she has learned over the past quarter century about New York City's Greenmarkets and their 25-year-history of dependence on Hudson Valley farming. And, in more recent years, about the upstate growers' local marketing of their products. Part fact, part philosophy, part human interest, Hudson Valley Harvest is a short but surprisingly thorough course in the mechanics of the new upstate "farm-to-marketry."

Mixing short chapters on things like "Early Seasons: Spring," "Vegetables," "Small Livestock" and "Markets" with profiles of the growers themselves that movingly elucidate their struggles and passion, Greenberg deftly keeps the reader interested and may well move many to become committed to her cause. She tells us how most of these family-run farms began, how they keep going--often by the skin of their teeth. And she encourages us to support them by eating at restaurants that serve their foods, and to fill our refrigerators and wine cellars with their products, whether bought at their seasonal stands and vineyards, or at local stores.

Greenberg gives us specific information about farm festivals and special events, regional restaurants, farm markets, wineries, orchards (many with pick-your-own option). And her extensive Appendix lists food, agriculture and conservation organizations for the many who surely will be hungry for more information on how to become involved.

The most affecting parts of the book, I found, were the grower profiles. The one on Taliaferro Farms begins: "'You know something?' said Pete Taliaferro on a boiling hot day in July, 'I am about ready to sell the land.' His fields were dry. There had been no rain for weeks. He had spent five hours getting his irrigation system to work. Once he got it going, it would cost him $180 to $250 in fuel per day to run. His farm abuts the banks of the Walkill River and his pump, a Rube Goldberg contraption with a 1983 Volkswagen diesel engine, had a leak..." The saga goes listing the vicissitudes of the farming life. . . until Mr. Taliaferro quotes from a love letter about his produce from a customer. The author remarks: "It's letters like this that keep Taliaferro going."

This is a heroic, comprehensive book yet small enough to keep traveling a well-worn path between the kitchen bookshelf and car glove compartment. It is huge in its good news, information and hefty implications for a healthy, lush future Hudson Valley, if we all pitch in.

I am so glad that Jan Greenberg did all this work for me and my family. It enables me to improve my health and my life and enter my community in ways I hadn't dreamed of. Hudson Valley Harvest is that rarity: a feel-good book with a strong moral message. What better combination could you ask for?

Consumed By Passion
by Mary Leonard

Review of A Ship Made of Paper by Scott Spencer (Ecco Press/HarperCollins, hardcover, $24.95)

A Ship Made of Paper by Scott Spencer is set in a bucolic Hudson River town, Leyden, near a small college, Marlowe, and near many rundown river mansions. Familiar yet? How about this. "The conductor is Ethan Greenblatt, president of Marlowe College, a handsome young academic superstar with an explosion of curly hair and a fussy bowtie." Leon Botstein at Bard College? The Hudson Valley reader can play this game incessantly. Where is the Koffee Kup? Does Spencer mean White School House Road and not Red?

But Spencer's novel is much more intriguing than local color, because the color that Spencer negotiates is the boundary of an interracial love affair and its difficulties in this upstate community. The African American woman, Iris, is married to Hampton, a proud and successful businessman who works in the city during the week while Iris pursues a graduate degree at Marlowe. Daniel, the central character, and the man in love with Iris, has left his prestigious and lucrative NYC law firm in an "art deco building on Lexington Ave." to escape from a threat by a Black client who Daniel unsuccessfully defended on a drug charge. Daniel openly admits that he is afraid of Blacks and yet he is passionately and obsessively drawn to Iris, whom he meets daily at My Little Wooden Shoe nursery school where he delivers his partner, Kate's child, Ruby, who coincidentally has a crush on Nelson, Iris and Hampton's son. In an early fall freakish snowstorm, when the power lines go down, and Daniel and Ruby are forced to spend the night at Iris's home, Daniel and Iris fall into each other's arms and the secret and dangerous love affair begins.

This is only the beginning of Daniel's difficulties: a search for a blind woman in the woods behind one of the mansions, a holdup in a French bistro by young African American runaways from a nearby juvenile detention home, and finally a freak accident. But it is not the well-knit and complicated plot that will pull you in, a plot that could make this novel prime material for a film. (In fact, in 2000, Jodie Foster produced Spencer's last book, Waking the Dead.) No, it's not the intricacies and the well developed characters that interested me, but Spencer's ability to write about racism without any fear of crossing politically correct boundaries and to explore passionate love scenes without the fear of being too explicit or of receiving an R rating.

Woven into the plot is the character of Kate, Daniel's partner, who is a NYC writer obsessed with becoming the journalistic authority on the O.J. Simpson trial. She is compelling in the role of the abandoned mistress because she is intelligent, insightful and witty. "But wit is not the source of Iris's allure. Hers is a different sort of grace, unadorned and total, the grace of the sea, the grace of angels, and sex."

After growing up as the son of older parents, who tell Daniel that they are leaving their inheritance to the Raptor Center, a local bird sanctuary, Daniel desires warmth, sex and community and believes he has found nirvana in Iris. Toward the end of the novel, Spencer tells us that "he (Daniel) has entered this higher plane of devotion, and a higher plane of pleasure."

I couldn't help thinking that Edith Wharton would have loved this novel because she too used the Hudson River Valley as her locale and she too explored the difficulties of passion, especially in her novel Ethan Frome. And in some ways I heard an echo of Ethan Frome's fatalistic ending in A Ship Made of Paper, especially when Daniel says, "there's no turning back." Yet I also felt a certain satisfaction. Daniel is an honest, moral man who is consumed by passion but survives. He says early on in the novel, "that he is not put together for such difficulties," but I think he is, and that Spencer takes us on journey through a landscape, that while it meanders and winds--literally, morally and sexually--never makes the reader feel unsafe or dissatisfied.