Arnold Bauer grew up on his family’s 160-acre farm in Goshen Township in Clay County, Kansas, amidst a land of prairie grass and rich creek-bottom soil. His meditative and moving account of those years depicts a century-long narrative of struggle, survival, and demise. A coming-of-age memoir set in the 1930s to 50s, Time’s Shadow blends local history with personal reflection to paint a realistic picture of farm life and families from a now-lost world.

Bauer’s was typical of true family farms, where wives supplemented family income by
selling butter and eggs and children provided unpaid labor. These hardworking farmers
were not particularly heroic or virtuous. They had their debts and doubts; but at the same
time their struggles for a kind of moral economy offer valuable lessons that merit our
attention today.

Among Bauer’s vivid recollections: driving a team of huge, clomping work horses;
his father’s daybreak call to long days in the field at age 12; and surviving eight years
of education in a one-room schoolhouse (with one teacher determined to have all
her students learn the harmonica). He shares the trials of Depression and drought,
experiences the coming of electricity—which prompted his father to take on a sideline as
an electrician—and reveals the vital importance of the local blacksmith. Throughout the
book, he finds wonder in the commonplace, like going to town on a Saturday night for a
black walnut ice cream cone.

“Bauer thoughtfully and gracefully examines a way of life that has disappeared. . . . On
a small, 160-acre farm, the family was an economic unit; and the mutual goal of keeping
the operation running and profitable superseded affection in binding husband, wife, and
children together. Although the community was well-peopled with other families, many
of which were cousins, a keen and somewhat melancholy sense of isolation pervades
this memoir. It arises in part from the endless open landscape itself, and in part from the
knowledge that the world it describes is long lost, but also, more prosaically, from the
extreme self-sufficiency of the farmers, who needed regularly from town only ‘coffee,
sugar, shoes and overalls.’” --The Atlantic

Here is a childhood that few in the United States will ever know. More than that, it is a
key to understanding the tragedy that befell the smaller family farms on the Great Plains
as sweeping changes after the mid-1950s—falling grain and livestock prices, adverse
terms of trade for agricultural products—turned out to be more devastating than tornados
or dust storms.

Gracefully written with a keen eye for the telling detail, Time’s Shadow eloquently captures the events of an era and the meaning it held for one boy and those around him.
It is a refreshingly unsentimental “Little House on the Prairie” that will resonate not only
with older compatriots but with anyone whose curiosity leads them to wonder about a
world we have lost.

Arnold Bauer went from his family farm to study in Mexico and Berkeley and to teach
Latin American Studies at the University of California at Davis. In 2005 he received
the “Order of Merit Gabriela Mistral,” the highest recognition the Chilean government
awards for contributions to education and culture. He lives in Davis.

Time's Shadow: Remembering a Family Farm in Kansas (Hardcover)

By Arnold J. Bauer

$24.95

ISBN-13: 9780700618439
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: University Press of Kansas, 5/2012

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