Pig Earth: Book One of the Into Their Labours Trilogy

If you've ever wondered what life as a peasant is like, this book will realistically inform you. Peasants still exist around the globe today, but their lives have improved little over the course of centuries since they were virtual slaves of wealthy, aristocratic landowners. John Berger, born in 1923, winner of the Booker Prize as well as other awards, is a famous English art critic, painter, poet, and novelist, who has written dozens of books. In the early 1980's he wrote Pig Earth, the first novel of his acclaimed trilogy Into Their Labours, about the European peasants of a small village in the French Alps, where he has lived for over thirty years of his life. This is a book of stories woven together into a tapestry of history, folklore, and fiction depicting the lives and struggles of modern french peasants as they face the challenges of maintaining their existence as a class as well as individually, in the world of megacorporate farming. The book is filled with stories of these people's lives which are, in turn, tragic, heroic, and comic.In recent times, in India, the lives of hundreds of thousands of peasants have been destroyed as their livlihoods have been taken from them due to the actions of farming corporations driving up their farming costs, consumming their region's water, and poisoning the land with chemical fertilizers and pesticides . . . land that India's peasants have farmed successfully, without their help and without the disastrous consequences, for millennia. The great agricultural devastion of the 1930's in our own country was caused by similar man-made practices. Today, still, in our country, more and more small-farm families are being forced to give up their livelihoods due to the same pressures caused by international megacorporations following the same practices. Our farmland, like so much else, is being taken over by them, driven by the lust of their executives and stockholders for more and more profit while poisoning the land with chemicals and destroying natural wildlife habitats through their monoculture farming. What will happen to our food supply when, within but a few decades, the enormous quantities of water and chemical fertilizers they require to produce it are no longer economically feasable?Are the world's peasants the "canary in the coal mine"?MOD

I once joked that "Pig Earth" was the Marxist Materialist equivalent to Jean Auel's "Clan of the Cave Bear." This book is perfect for cultural anthropology students, students of history, sociology, and those studying peasant societies, fluxes in rural societies and so on. John Berger's essays are poignant, simple to comprehend and are absent any of the postmodern verbiage that often seems to graffiti the pages of books of similar subject matter. Berger's prose and poetry is beautiful. As I read this, I thought of so many comparisons- blue state, red state (urban/rural) politics, peasant roles in the historic development in American society (most apparent in the Spanish Southwest). This book is wonderful, beautiful and really is underrated.

Book was in real good condition

The first chapter threw me off, but once in the stories it was much more interesting, having lived on a farm as a child.

A contemporary classic, and I don't use this term lightly. This book, with a series of short stories and poems leading up to a novella, is every bit as good as James Joyce's "Dubliners." And I would rate Berger's concluding novella, "The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol," right up there with Joyce's "The Dead," which is recognized as one of the best stories in English!

Beautifully written classic but weird love story , would like t see the movie. Hopefully this will happen before I die

Pig Earth is a poignant story about a segment of our society that were the foundations to our modern civilization. But due to exploitation and societal extortion ,they are rapidly becoming extinct.Freedom and Liberty are always a threat to organized societies so taxation becomes the bridal as demonstrated in one of the stories as they made "Gnole" just to celebrate life.

Recommended.

This is a fascinating range of stories with memorable characters, particularly in the final three connected stories. The life of the peasant class in rural France is vividly portrayed and the reality of their lives is presented without sentiment. A worthwhile read.

An amazing vignette of life in the farming communities of the French Alps with spare evocative sentences bringing the characters to life. A special mention for the three lives of Lucie Cabrol, the last three chapters of the book which take you up to the high pastures, lead you on a hunt for rare mushrooms and cumin seed and give you a real feeling for the tough, enigmatic life of generations of peasants.

Excellent - wonderfully written.

Brilliant stories

A dying era?