I received an early Christmas gift last night, James Baker Hall's Tobacco Harvest An Elegy. The book's black and white photographs of a Kentucky tobacco harvest is strikingly timeless and familiar to me as though they could be images that were taken directly from my own memory. If you weren't raised on a tobacco farm the images probably won't tug on your heartstrings like they do mine but they will give you an education and some insight into a way of life that is rapidly disappearing from America's rural landscape.

The book includes an essay by Wendell Berry (he's actually the subject of some of the photographs) that is as profound and brilliant as any of Berry's work.