Farm Memoir

A pioneer in forensic anthropology, Dr. Bill Bass created the world's first laboratory dedicated to the study of human decomposition. Bill Bass' research at "the Body Farm" has revolutionized forensic science, helping police crack cold cases and pinpoint time since death. In this riveting book, the bone sleuth explores the rise of modern forensic science, using cases from his career to take readers into the real world of "CSI".

On 7 August 1985, Nevill and June Bamber, their daughter, Sheila, and her two young sons, Nicholas and Daniel, were discovered shot to death at White House Farm in Essex. The murder weapon was found on Sheila's body; a Bible lay at her side. All the windows and doors of the farmhouse were secure, and the Bambers' son, 24-year-old Jeremy, had alerted police after apparently receiving a phone call from his father, who told him Sheila had 'gone berserk' with the gun. It seemed a straightforward case of murder-suicide, but a dramatic turn of events was to disprove the police's theory.

The once idyllic coastal plain of North Carolina is home to a close-knit, rural community that for more than a generation has battled the polluting practices of large-scale farming taking place in its own backyard. After years of frustration and futility, an impassioned cadre of local residents, led by a team of intrepid and dedicated lawyers, filed a lawsuit against one of the world’s most powerful companies—and, miraculously, they won. Wastelands takes us into a legal battle over the future of America’s farmland and the lives of the people who found the courage to fight.

Jim May grew up in the 1950's, among farm people who had lived along Illinois's Nippersink Creek for generations. Stories told around the kitchen tables, front porches, and horse-trading barns brought laughs, inspired love, and helped ease the sometimes tragic turn of life's events. Speaking in the familiar voice of a longtime neighbor, May shares humorous and affecting events, as well as his Chicago Emmy Award winning tribute to his father, "A Bell for Shorty".

Nowhere is there another lab like Dr. Bill Bass's: on a hillside in Tennessee, human bodies decompose in the open air, aided by insects, bacteria and birds, unhindered by coffins or mausoleums. At the "Body Farm," nature takes its course, with corpses buried in shallow graves, submerged in water, concealed beneath slabs of concrete, locked in trunks of cars. As stand-ins for murder victims, they serve the needs of science, and the cause of justice.

Born and raised in Zimbabwe, Douglas Rogers is the son of White farmers living through that country's long and tense transition from postcolonial rule. He escaped the dull future mapped out for him by his parents for one of adventure and excitement in Europe and the United States. But when Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe launched his violent program to reclaim White-owned land and Rogers' parents were caught in the cross fire, everything changed.

Today he is known as Dr. Q, an internationally renowned neurosurgeon and neuroscientist who leads cutting-edge research to cure brain cancer. But not too long ago, he was Freddy, a 19-year-old undocumented migrant worker toiling in the fields of Central California. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa tells his amazing life story - from his impoverished childhood in the tiny village of Palaco, Mexico, to his harrowing border crossing and his transformation from illegal immigrant to American citizen and gifted student at the University of California at Berkeley and at Harvard Medical School.

Amanda Owen loves her traditional life on her hill farm alongside her nine children and husband Clive. And, as listeners of her previous best sellers will know, every day at Ravenseat brings surprises. In Adventures of the Yorkshire Shepherdess Amanda takes us from her family’s desperate race to save a missing calf to finding her bra has been repurposed as a house martin’s nest and from wild swimming to the brutal winter of 2018 that almost brought her to her knees. As busy as she is with her family and flock though, an exciting new project soon catches her eye....

Roseanne Barr is a force of nature. Whether taking the sitcom world by storm, challenging accepted social norms, or battling the wild pigs inhabiting her nut farm in Hawaii, she is not to be trifled with. In this audiobook, Roseanne unleashes her razor-sharp observations on hypocrisy, hubris, and self-perpetuating institutions of questionable value - as well as menopause, pharmaceuticals, and her grandkids. And she's as controversial, original, and funny as ever.

Sally Urwin and her husband, Steve, own High House Farm in Northumberland, which they share with Mavis the sheepdog, one very fat pony and many, many sheep. Set in beautiful, wild landscape, and in use for generations, it's the perfect setting for Sally's (sometimes brutally) honest and charming account of farming life. From stock sales to lambing sheds, and out in the fields in snow and on hot summer days, A Farmer's Diary reveals the highs, lows and hard work involved in making a living from the land.

When Rosanne and her husband left city life for the Cornwall idyll they knew little of farming, the seasons and milking, but over time they found their way, rising to each new challenge and embracing all that the land gave them. Growing Goats and Girls lovingly and invitingly charts the rural, hardworking and joyfully haphazard lives of Rosanne and her husband as they escape London to live off the land.

From the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Chesapeake Requiem comes a gripping new work of narrative nonfiction telling the forgotten story of the mass killing of eleven Black farmhands on a Georgia plantation in the spring of 1921—a crime which exposed for the nation the existence of the “peonage system,” a form of legal enslavement established after the Civil War across the American South.

Reeling from the pain of devastating miscarriages and suffering from PTSD after military adventures in Afghanistan, Merlin and his wife Lizzie decide to leave the bustle of London and return to Merlin’s childhood home, a Cornish hill farm called Cabilla in the heart of Bodmin Moor. There, they are met by unexpected challenges: a farm slipping ever further into debt, the discovery that the overgrazed and damaged woods running throughout the valley are in fact one of the UK’s last remaining fragments of Atlantic temperate rainforest, and the sudden and near catastrophic strickening by Covid.

Now raising their four-year-old daughter, Indiana, alone, after Joey’s passing, Rory Feek digs deeper into the soil of his life and the unusual choices he and his wife, Joey, made together and the ones he’s making now to lead his family into the future. When Feek and his older daughters moved into a run-down farmhouse almost 20 years ago, he had no idea of the almost fairy-tale love story that was going to unfold on that small piece of Tennessee land. He takes listeners on his incredible journey from heartbreak to hope and, ultimately, the kind of healing that comes only through faith.

In 1968, during Albert Lepard's fifth escape from a life sentence at Parchman Penitentiary, he kidnapped Lovejoy Boteler, then 18 years old, from his family's farm in Grenada, Mississippi. Three decades later, still beset by half-buried memories of that time, Boteler began researching his kidnapper's nefarious, sordid life to discover how and why this terrifying abduction occurred.

God is good, all the time. Jim Wilson was born in 1927 and raised in a Depression-era farming family. At the age of 16, at the height of World War II, he became the primary breadwinner for his parents and four younger siblings. At age 17, eager to fight for his country, he enlisted in the Navy. Germany surrendered while he was in the recruiting office, and the war was over by the time he entered boot camp. But God had a plan for Jim Wilson in the US Navy.

The Baby Farm Murders is a chilling account of Amelia Dyer, who was responsible for the deaths of up to 400 children, making her one of the most prolific serial killers in True Crime history. Ryan Green provides a suspenseful narrative that draws the listener into the real-life horror experienced by the victims with all the elements of a captivating thriller.

In the fall of 1994, Erich Baumeister (13), was playing in a wooded area of his family’s estate, when he stumbled across a partially buried human skeleton. He presented the disturbing finding to his mother, Julie, who inquired about the skull to her husband, Herb. He told her that the skeleton belonged to his late father, an anesthesiologist. Astonishingly, Julie believed him. In You Think You Know Me, best-selling author Ryan Green assumes the role of Herb Baumeister and attempts to fill in the blanks on one of Indiana’s most mysterious serial killers.

Born-and-raised Johns Island resident Lee Glover tells the story of the evolution of his home from a rural agrarian setting to a rapidly changing sea island of the Low Country. Traditionally, Johns Island produced millions of pounds of fresh produce that was shipped all across America every year. Each summer, migrants and workers of all description, and in numbers sometimes surpassing the island's total population, flocked to participate in the harvest.

Miss Unlikely takes you through Betty’s unconventional childhood, the surprising pageant journey, an incredible year as Miss America, a fairy-tale wedding, and everything in between. She offers wisdom on school, boys, self-esteem, choices, disappointments, insecurities, mentors, cyberbullies, and more. Behind-the-scenes moments and previously untold stories show how her faith and family ultimately carried her through difficult times. Betty’s personal and sincere account will remind you the only way to get where you want to go is through God’s unique plan.