Irvin S. Cobb had a problem. He read too many magazines. Every periodical in America was promising that the simple life awaited anyone bold enough to abandon the city for a farm, and Cobb, like countless other urban dreamers, believed them. The Abandoned Farmers is his excruciatingly funny account of trying to make that fantasy real. He and his wife set out to find their perfect rural retreat, only to discover that abandoned farms are abandoned for very good reasons, that local realtors have a flexible relationship with the truth, and that country neighbors arrive uninvited and stay indefinitely. Cobb's wit is sharp and his observations surgically precise: he captures the specific humiliation of being condescended to by people whose teeth are worse than yours, the particular despair of a chicken that has chosen your garden for its final resting place, and the quiet horror of realizing you've bought a property where even the well is skeptical of your leadership. This is not a nostalgia piece about pastoral charm. It's a gleeful dismantling of the back-to-the-land movement by a man who actually tried it and lived to tell the tale. Cobb understands that the appeal of rural life is inversely proportional to actually living it, and he renders that gap with enormous comic pleasure. For anyone who has ever dreamed of escaping the city and immediately regretted the planning stages, this book is a masterpiece of Schadenfreude.
