02872cam a2200445u 4500 61427450 MeVbMML 20250716144009.0 ta 110309s2006 oncabc 000 0aeng c 0676977529 22.00 9780676977523 (hbk.) (OCoLC)61427450 UBY UBY NLC ORU YDXCP UBY MEU AJM pcc n-cn-sn MEUO PR9199.3.W47 O48 2006 PS8545 I38 Z47 2006 PS8545 I38 Z47 2006 PS8545* 971.24/2 B 22 Wiebe, Rudy Henry, 1934- 21845 Of this earth : a Mennonite boyhood in the boreal forest / Rudy Wiebe 1st ed Toronto : Alfred A. Knopf Canada, c2006 ix, 391 p. : ill., maps, ports. ; 22 cm In Of This Earth, Rudy Wiebe gives vivid life again to the vanished world of Speedwell, Saskatchewan, an isolated, poplar-forested, mostly Mennonite community – and Rudy’s first home. Too young to do heavy work, Rudy witnessed a way of life that was soon to disappear. And we experience with him the hard labour of clearing the stony, silty bushland; the digging out of precious wells one bucket of dirt at a time; sorrow at the death of a beloved sister; the disorienting searches for grazing cattle in the vast wilderness sloughs and the sweet discovery of the power of reading. Rare personal photographs (reproduced throughout the book) and the fragile memories of those who are left give shape to the story of Mennonite immigrants building a life in Canada, the growth and decline of the small Speedwell community, the sway of religion, and a young boy’s growing love of the extreme beauty of the aspen forests – as well as how all these elements came to inform his destiny as a writer. A hymn to a lost place and a distant time, Of This Earth follows the best of memoirs in the tradition of Sharon Butala’s The Perfection of the Morning and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. It is an evocation of the Canadian west that only a writer of Rudy Wiebe’s powers could summon. Wiebe, Rudy Henry, 1934- Childhood and youth 21846 Wiebe, Rudy, 1934- Enfance et jeuness 21847 Mennonites Saskatchewan Speedwell Biography 21848 Farm life Saskatchewan Speedwell 21849 Authors, Canadian 20th century Biography 20343 Mennonites Saskatchewan Speedwell Biographies 21850 Vie ̉la ferme Saskatchewan Speedwell 21851 Écrivains canadiens-anglais 20e sic̈le Biographies 21852 Speedwell (Sask.) Biographies 21853 ddc BOOK 2972 2972 0 0 ABELJ abelj B 2016-10-26 0 B WIEB 18696 2016-10-26 22.00 2016-10-26 BOOK