Description: Carrying the story of the rural landscape into our frantic era, he describes the "bow wave"where city life meets rural agriculture and plots the effect of recreation and its structures on the look of the land.
Brief description: John Fraser Hart is professor of geography at the University of Minnesota. His previous books include The South, The Land That Feeds Us (recipient of the J. B. Jackson Prize from the American Association of Geographers), and, as editor, Our Changing Cities. The Rural Landscape is a thoroughly reworked successor to his earlier book, The Look of the Land, with only a few relict features.
Review Quotes: John Fraser Hart's study of the ever-changing rural landscape is a competent and richly illustrated account of human endeavour, charting patterns of land use across time and space, from the small cross-ploughed fields of Neolithic Britain to the vast wheat-producing plains of modern-day America. It reveals how history is continuously incorporated into the landscape.
--Times Literary Supplement