by James, Rebanks is an ode to small farms and a Silent Spring-like warning about the toll that industrial farming is taking on the environment. Rebanks is both a writer and a farmer, tending land his family has worked on for generations in England’s Lake District. In his previous book, The Shepherd’s Life, he chronicled his fraught relationship with farm life as a boy, his education at Oxford University, and his return to farming. In Pastoral Song, he muses on the difference between his grandfather’s methods of farming and the industrialized, profit-driven ways that his father’s generation was pushed toward. Rebanks’ writing about the landscape and animals he loves is poetic and evocative; fans of James Herriot will find much to love. (Non-Fiction)