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Divide: The Relationship Crisis between Town and Country by Anna Jones: book review




Divide: The Relationship Crisis between Town and Country by Anna Jones (2022) is set in the United Kingdom. Growing up in the 1990s in the country – on the English-Welsh border – the author moves to the city to experience urban working life and later returns to her rural roots. The author is the BBC Radio 4 Farming Today presenter.

 

The book is sectioned into 8 chapters: (1) Home, (2) Work, (3) Politics, (4) Diversity, (5) Animals, (6) Food, (7) Environment, and (8) Community. 

 

Food, agriculture, and the environment are interconnected. This is the author’s call to the public for action to respect social, political, and cultural differences – particularly between farmers, country folk, city visitors to the country, and city folk. But also consumers and users. Mostly, she explores the rationale of people who remain in the country, leave temporarily or permanently, city folk who want to live in the country, and the return of the nostalgic child. 

 

In this call to action, Anna Jones includes research, case studies, personal history, family and friend connections, and interviews with a range of stakeholders – urban-rural, industry, agriculural, government, climate activists, and environmentalists.  

 

I received this book from a Welsh friend who was raised in rural Australia. Her pencil markings reveal her interests and/or concerns. Most were in the environment chapter. I too have Welsh roots, living both in urban and rural settings in Australia and overseas. My current interests are the home-work chapters, but particularly the diversity, community, and animal chapters; and above all, the food chapter. 

 

The author does mention wool, textiles, and fashion, although I would prefer a separate chapter covering her view on these topics. 

 

This book is both an intensely personal view and a (mostly objectively) critical look at the differences and connections between city and country life. It is part memoir and part documentary, easy to read, and easy to follow her reasoning and argument. Despite the book being engaging and a bridge between the two realities, Divide: The Relationship Crisis between Town and Country is sure to evoke strong opinions, with many readers taking one side or the other of the great divide.  









 

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS  is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).


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