Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2015686 in Books
• Published on: 2003-02
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.30 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 350 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In 1952, Geld, the daughter of an Ohio agrarian scholar, moved to Brazil with her farmer husband in search of land to cultivate. After several years of managing other people's fazendas (plantations), the two (with their children) finally bought their own land. While her husband managed their fazenda, Geld wrote cultural columns for a Brazilian newspaper and raised their children. Her descriptions of native workers can be condescending; her references to the "flatheaded, jugeared, earth-colored" men and the repeated use of the terms "ignorance" and "passivity" lend an air of anachronistic ethnocentrism. In counterpoint, she offers depictions of the cultured and intellectual upper- and middle-class hosts she and her husband met, along with a dismissal of the onerous nature of Brazilian politics. Geld simply ignores the political complexities of land ownership by foreigners as Brazilians work land they will never own. Though attentive to some ecological details, such as the runoff from sugar mills and the perils of topsoiling, Geld's ignorance of other ecological perils in the country on which so much of the planet is dependent for oxygen (Brazil has the world's largest rainforest) is troubling. Her attempts to draw parallels between the rich Ohio agrarian society of her youth and the subtropical poverty of a Brazilian farm economy in the midst of shifting political fortunes is strained as well. Geld's work is full of vivid memoir and storytelling, but devoid of any political consciousness regarding her role as an expatriate landowner in a nation rife with economic and class strife. Photos, maps.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Publisher
Letter from Ellen Bromfield Geld

Dear Reader,

Despite my having published nine books and countless chronicles, I have never until now seen fit to respond in writing to criticism. This time, however, it seems to me that the review of my book, VIEW FROM THE FAZENDA: A Tale of the Brazilian Heartlands, recently published in Publishers Weekly and subsequently posted on Amazon is so misleading as to make a response both fair and necessary.

Misconception in this review begins by describing my father, Pulitzer prize-winning novelist and world-renowned conservationist, Louis Bromfield as "an Ohio agrarian scholar." From there the reviewer goes on to refer to my columns in Brazil's leading newspaper O Estado de São Paulo, as cultural, although in fact they mostly pertained to agriculture, education and the lives of rural people in general, be they farm owners, sharecroppers or farm, hands. In my approach to these last, I am accused of "anachronistic ethnocentricism" for the use of such words as "ignorance" and "passivity," as well as ignoring "the political complexities of of land ownership by foreigners as Brazilians work the land they will never own." Beyond this the book is represented as maintaining, "ignorance of ecological perils in the country on which so much of the planet depends for oxygen." This despite some forty pages dedicated to a farming settlement in the Amazon wherein ecological conditions are my primary concern.

Having done my best to comprehend how the reviewer could have read this book and come to these and similarly strange conclusions, I can only conclude, myself, that the answer lies in this final damning sentence.

"Geld's work is full of vivid memoir and storytelling but devoid of any political consciousness regarding her role as an expatriate landowner in a nation rife with economic and class strife."

For it is with a consistently prejudiced and categorizing eye that the critic insists on approaching VIEW FROM THE FAZENDA as though it were meant to be an academic, socio-economic treatise. This, although one has only to take a look at the book to discover from the start that , yes, it is a book of memoir and storytelling. As such, it deals with all kinds of Brazilians living in various eras at one and the same time in such different regions as the Amazon; the drought stricken northeast; the new frontiers of central Brazil where—rather than "the subtropical poverty of a Brazilian farm economy" as the reviewer puts it—sustainable agriculture is responsible for this country’s becoming the world's second largest producer of grains.

Indeed the tales and memoirs are drawn from half a century's experience of farming, wandering and writing as I go. They are used to describe, as best as I can, a vast and diverse country and the imaginative, spirited people who, like ourselves, have come from every corner of the world to mingle and make of Brazil the open-minded, ever-changing nation that it is.

For those of you who might have been swayed by the review, I hope you take my words into consideration as you decide whether or not to read the book. For those of you who are inclined to pick up the book, my wish is for you to take it in and enjoy it in the same spirit in which it was written.

Sincerely, Ellen Bromfield Geld

From the Inside Flap
"Ellen Bromfield Geld couldn’t have had a better teacher in all the world than her father. Her writing and her life in Brazil vividly re-flect the strength of Louis Bromfield’s convictions, his love of the land and the enduring importance ofhis legacy."—Lauren Bacall

"In oftentimes poetic language, she paints a portrait as diverse as the country itself as she traverses to its far corners over the ensuing years. Whether riding a vintage paddle-wheel steamer down the . . . [r]iver, taking a group of visiting U.S. farmers on tour, attending Carnaval, or traveling deep into a mountainside where garimpeiros search for diamonds, Geld discusses history, politics and culture. She introduces the reader to unforgettable people: Dona Zeze, "who appeared from nowhere with her nine children and an old dog" and moved into the abandoned school house down the road; and Amadeu, who at age twelve, motherless and poverty-stricken, cut trees and planted coffee with the men. . . . This book resembles Geld’s tasty description of the Brazilian dish arroz carreterio: "onions, garlic, parsley, and tiny bits of sun-dried beef sauteed and then simmered with rice till dry but loose and delicious." —ForeWord Magazine

"A charming book that can be enjoyed on three levels. First, Geld gives an intimate portrayal of the people of Brazil she has come to know and what it is like living among them. Second, she describes from first-hand experience the settling of the frontier in Brazil in the twentieth-century, which was much like the settling of the U.S. a century earlier. Third, and best of all, this is the story of an amazing American couple who with courage and wit but little money, start a homestead adventure in a foreign land and, against all odds, turn it into a successful farm. Having often championed the work of Geld's father, Louis Bromfield, in print, I almost feel guilty having to say that for me Geld is the better writer of the two. And psssst, a better farmer too."

—Gene Logsdon, author of The Man Who Created Paradise

"Ellen Geld’s account of farming in Brazil takes the reader to a rug-ged and beautiful place. As she tells of her family’s adventures, the author also looks beyond at the country—the view from the fazenda—and describes with gusto Brazil’s teeming rivers, all-but-impenetrable forests, its fields and farms, its myriad exotic crea-tures, its great variety of plants, foods and flowers, and its unique stalwart people."—Dorothy Weil, author of The River Home

"Writing with a passion and point-of-view reminiscent of her fa-mous father, Louis Bromfield, Ellen Bromfield Geld describes from her firsthand experience the rapid and at times frightening trans-formation of Brazil’s rural and wild landscapes over the past fifty years. Along the way, she introduces a fascinating cast of charac-ters—rich and poor, powerful and powerless, wise and mis-guided—involved in this incredible spectacle. View from the Fazenda recalls our own rush

to ‘civilize’ the American wilderness, and questions the social, spiritual, and environmental costs of such ‘progress.’"—John Warfield Simpson, author of Yearning for the Land: A Search for the Importance of Place