• The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka — First released in 1978, this book about natural farming and permaculture was republished by The New York Review of Books in 2009. “The One-Straw Revolution is one of the founding documents of the alternative food movement, and indispensable to anyone hoping to understand the future of food and agriculture.” — Michael Pollan
• The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan — Egan tells an extraordinary tale in this visceral account of how America’s great, grassy plains turned to dust, and how the ferocious plains winds stirred up an endless series of “black blizzards” that were like a biblical plague: “Dust clouds boiled up, ten thousand feet or more in the sky, and rolled like moving mountains” in what became known as the Dust Bowl. — Publishers Weekly
• The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck — Published in 1931, the novel by the Nobel Prize-winning author tells the story of Chinese peasant farmer Wang Lung and his family and their struggles with the sweeping changes of the twentieth century.
• The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan — Pollan writes about how our food is grown — what it is, in fact, that we are eating. The book is really three in one: The first section discusses industrial farming; the second, organic food, both as big business and on a relatively small farm; and the third, what it is like to hunt and gather food for oneself. — The Washington Post