In the Blood: Understanding America's Farm Families breathes life into statistics and stereotypes alike with stories from America's heartland. Robert Wuthnow draws from 250 interviews with farmers and rural community members to complicate and clarify stereotypical portrayals of the “typical” American farmer. In the Blood argues that contemporary farming remains an important, but misunderstood, facet of American life. In a nation where fewer than 2 percent of American citizens farm, and only 20 percent live in rural communities, those who do farm find the challenges of their daily lives grossly misunderstood by most of their fellow Americans. Wuthnow's farmers are neither greedy simpletons claiming government handouts nor virtuous saints upholding a declining, rural morality (193). Rather, Wuthnow's monograph articulates the multidimensionality of twenty-first-century American farming. Today, farmers wrestle with tensions between family and business, the intersections of rural community support and neighborly competition for land, and contradictions between attentiveness to the role of God in nature and a new generation of technology permitting increased control of the environment.

The first three chapters of In the Blood discuss the tensions, competitions, and varying models of engagement of farmers with their families, their neighbors, and religion. In chapter 4, Wuthnow turns to the ideological challenge of independence. In the final three chapters, Wuthnow considers how farmers think about the major changes in land care and value, technological modernization, and the ever-present, if invisible, hand of the capitalistic marketplace.

The book's work is ambitious, and at the hand of someone less skilled it might have devolved into an atheoretical mess of nostalgia. But with the easy prose of a prolific writer and the theoretical insight of a seasoned student of religion, American studies, and small-town social life, Wuthnow skillfully weaves a cohesive tapestry of contemporary American farming from individual stories of farmers scattered across four agricultural regions in middle America. These farmers still earn their primary income from growing crops or raising livestock in conventional ways and at varying scales. Through highlighting differences and commonalities within their stories with sparse and precise use of social theories concerning kinship, community formation, religion, ethics, and economic change, Wuthnow's beautiful writing permits the voices of these farmers to emerge. By the last chapter, the reader may feel fondness towards a handful of the farmers whose stories, told under pseudonymous names, propelled forward the seven thematic chapters.

In the Blood contributes novel insights on the changing meanings of independence, a “basic value” integral to American farming lore, and is particularly trenchant for contemporary scholars of change in American rural communities. The independence of farming still claims a powerful hold on the imagination of farmers; in their chosen occupation, they can make their own decisions and “be their own boss” (95). And yet, Wuthnow observes, this independence is constrained by changing contexts of government regulations, volatile markets, and formalized contractual working relationships with family and neighbors. Contemporary scholarly work on conventional American agriculture tends to speak either to mechanistic shifts in policy, economics, and labor or to changing ideological or cultural contexts to farming. In the Blood’s meditation on the changing meanings of independence not only joins these material and ideological perspectives of change in contemporary American agriculture, but effectively links the myriad political and economic constraints to the same theoretical underpinning.

In the Blood breathes some real-life complexity into the stereotypes and statistics of farming in America. This book would be particularly good as a teaching tool for university courses emphasizing American rural studies. For instance, the chapters on technological modernization and markets, taken together, cogently explain relationships between subsidies, international trade deals, high-risk loans for large machinery, and land competition in contemporary farming in a globalizing economy. Even the Appendix provides an excellent overview of the strengths, limitations, and epistemologies of qualitative research.

My sole critique is that In the Blood minimizes relevant differences in class, gender, scale of farm, and race. Certainly, the book purposes to focus on complexities facing “ordinary farmers” and leave analysis of atypical, “special populations,” such as Amish or African American sharecroppers, in the capable hands of other contemporary scholars (193). However, In the Blood grants minimal attention to the shifting power dynamics and resulting conflicts of structural difference within contemporary rural America. The author briefly considers tensions brought about by immigration (47–48, 60) even as farm labor in conventional agriculture, and particularly dairy, is increasingly provided by workers from Latin America. Additionally, In the Blood barely gestures towards class and gender conflicts among farmers of varying scale and style, categories which both shape opportunity structures for farm continuity. Leaning into the shifting demographic difference characterizing rural America would have illuminated new challenges facing today's conventional farming communities.

In sum, In the Blood is a masterpiece of accessible prose and analytically interesting sociology; a book that would interest not only scholars of American studies but the very people whose lives Wuthnow describes with kindness, perceptivity, and accuracy.