Dear County Agent Guy: Calf Pulling, Husband Training, and Other Curious Dispatches from a Midwestern Dairy Farmer

"In the tradition of Mark Twain and Jean Shepherd, Dave Barry and Garrison Keillor, Jerry Nelson is a humorist whose beat is the American heartland, a small-town world of pickup trucks and Sunday night pancake dinners, dropping in on neighbors and complaining to the country agent. A fourth-generation dairy farmer, Jerry Nelson discovered his voice after he wrote a tongue-in-cheek letter to his county agent for advice on what to do, after a period of heavy rain, about the ducks and Jet Skiers frolicking in his cornfields. From then on Jerry had a new calling to go along with his day job-writing a humorous column called "Dear County Agent Guy." Jerry's depictions of daily life, from the point of view of a taciturn husband with a twinkle in his eye, are read by 250,000 people a week--and occasionally woven into A Prairie Home Companion scripts. These are stories of courtship (Jerry refers to himself as a Norwegian bachelor farmer); childbirth (he offers the delivery room doctor the use of his calf puller); family (he beautifully describes rummaging with his sons through an abandoned family homestead); the duties of a husband (exactly why is it that a man who spends his days in cow manure can't change a baby's diaper?); the days of chores (never will the reader look at a grain silo the same way again). Knee-slappingly funny one moment, poignant the next, it's a very special look at a distinctly American way of life"--