Description: In 1911, W. J. Dougan founded a farm near Beloit, Wisconsin, and working with the University of Wisconsin built on it an unusual round barn. Using anecdotes, stories, and vivid description, Jacqueline Dougan Jackson recalls the hardships and satisfactions of farm life and the struggles -- both communal and personal -- to build a life worth living.

On the Dougan farm, that goal demands hard work but also leaves room enough for good humor and the colorful lives (and troubles) of the cast. Not least among the characters are the cows, such as the notorious M-12, an animal infamous for attacking children. Dairy cows are the lifeblood of the farm and as such in need of constant care, whether through the curative powers of gin or the more modern techniques of artificial insemination.

And though the stories revolve around the farm, they are also of a time. The Depression nearly drags the farm under. The situation is so desperate that when Jackson's father finds a mouse in the butter churn, he grapples with whether or not to destroy the precious butter. As a thirteen-year-old, Jackson develops a crush on one of the summer barnhands and watches as he goes away to war.

A fascinating mixture of biography, history, and creative nonfiction, Stories from the Round Barn is a moving tribute to the legacy of generations past and proof that "everything, in all dimensions, is bound together".

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