FARM

Hosannas for American farming as the biggest, the best, the most bountiful in the world—and a raspberry for those backward little guys in Europe and Asia about whose prodigies of production Paulsen evidently knows nothing at all. This is naked hucksterism, likable when Paulsen is recounting the crazy history of sheep-raising, questionable when he attributes the decimation of buffalo herds to an inexorable need for leather and prairie farmland, pernicious—and dead wrong—when he ascribes every agricultural advance,whether in stock breeding, equipment development, or cooperative organization, to American initiative. The last lapse is the outdated, reiterated assertion that "there is no surplus of food anywhere in the world"—which will be news to American farmers in 1977. But in this saga of conquest there are no falling incomes either, no subsidies, no Farmers Union, no Cargill or Del Monte or other agri-businesses. No index, for that matter, not that there'd be anything to look up.