I loved every minute of this book.
My Dad grew up on a farm, about 12 years later than Mr. Carter, and 2000 miles north and west of him. I've always loved hearing my Dad's stories of life on the Iowa farm, and I loved Mr. Carter's book about his family's Georgia farm.

An incredible look at a Democratic Baptist upbringing begin in the pre-electric, pre-Civil Rights American South. Deeply affectionate, surprisingly candid.

This book was recommended to me by my husband's grandmother. I can definitely see why she liked it as she grew up on a farm. This book is a nice look at farmlife during the depression. It's a world of difficulties, challenges, fun memories, imaginitive minds and especially .... NO TV! I like how it seems more like I'm listening to someone talk about their memories instead of reading a story from beginning to end.

I first started reading this book around six years ago, but it never grabbed me. So I did something I hardly ever do and put it aside. After Jimmy Carter’s recent death, I decided to try again. The book still didn’t grab me, but I muddled through it. In a typical autobiography, the author would likely spend a few chapters on their youth. And there were enough interesting stories in this book to fill three or four chapters. Not enough for an entire book, though. It’s impressive that President Carter remembered so many details from his childhood, but he didn’t have to share every single name of anyone he met. There were some fascinating bits about life in the South in Depression-era America (sharecropping, the introduction of electricity and cars, racial interactions) and I’m glad I read the book. But I had to slog through a lot of snooze-worthy minutia to take it in.

This well written memoir is essentially a slice of Jimmy Carter's life until he leaves for Annapolis in his Sophmore year of college. He shows you what his day-to-day life was like on his farm in Archery (a town which no longer exists) and at home and in school in Plains, and also gives you the background for his ancestors and his knowledge of and memories of his grandparents and parents.

What I found most fascinating was Jimmy Carter's view into every day life on his farm in the South during the depression. How they worked, what the economics was for him and the sharecroppers and day laborers on the farm and for his friends (all black), and what the social and political situations were.

Of course, Jimmy Carter could only report what he remembered and certainly his view would have been tempered by what was normal to him as opposed to how those same events would have been shared by his black neighbors, but he clearly tries to give us as much of their view as possible and also tries to see his childhood and the childhoods of his friends through adult eyes so that we can see how their lives differed from his. I thoroughly enjoyed this memoir of Georgia in the 30s and 40s. Recommended.

Fascinated by this former president, I stumbled upon this book of his “early days.” His vision of the world at this time compels me to research further how it shaped his political career and find more works dedicated to those efforts. Solid read authored by the character himself.

Here it is, early Nov in a tense election year, and this book came recommended to me by a podcast episode about political memoirs. I deeply admire this good man -- who is still with us at 100 years old -- and wanted to spend some time "with him" while he's alive, and while this is a story of early boyhood of a living great, rather than something like a historical document.

Well, it is an odd book. It's an interesting history of growing up in a very specific time and place, and OH BY THE WAY you may not ever realize it, but this farmboy became a president. You will read 241 pages to learn that his Uncle Buddy was county commissioner and a mayor who eventually earned $2/month around 1954...and that is almost as close as you'll get to hearing about a political life. This is strictly his love for Plains and his time as a boy in a time I can really only conceive of as "history."

In these last days of his life, this life story can still feel alive and connected to our 2024 reality. I don't know what will happen with the US election in a few days, but I'm hoping that his history and levelheaded kindness will be honored in our country.

Learned a lot about Carter and his childhood. He gives credit where credit is due. Very interesting.

I read this for a book group. I always liked and admired Jimmy Carter as a president. His memoir was interesting reading but a troublesome commentary on what life was like in the Depression-era south. Boyhood life as recalled here was hard -- but he was a privileged child of a prominent family, and it must have been unimaginably harder for those not so fortunate. I noted near the end of the book his comment that his (black) childhood friend A.D. Davis "got married; he eventually had twelve children, served four years in prison on a conviction of forgery, and then lived the rest of his life peacefully in Plains." A.D. was the boy Jimmy Carter most admired in childhood, but one who could not attend the white school, and who, around the age of 14, began to defer to him, as was apparently considered proper at that time. What might HE have accomplished had had the world been different?

What a privilege to step inside the childhood of one of the most extraordinary living Americans. This is easily in the top 5 books I've read in 2011.

(by the way: I feel like this book never got the press it deserved because it came out late 2001... oops).

I wasn't expecting to read this in 48 hours... and yet, I couldn't put it down. This book, a collection of memories from Carter's upbringing in rural Georgia during the depression, paints such a vivid picture of that time and place in America that it's a valuable read for anyone even if you don't admire Jimmy Carter as much as I do.

I feel like I now understand so much more about the economics and culture of agriculture during that time, and the social landscape of segregation. Carter spent much of his boyhood at the kitchen tables of Black sharecroppers on his family farm, and the writing employs subtlety to demonstrate what that relationship was like. I learned so much about the long-held resentment towards the North that families harbored since the Civil War-- not just that they held these feelings but the way it manifested in their daily lives and culture.

The writing is fantastic. Carter (or his ghostwriter) exercises some restraint; while at times I wished there was more in-depth discussion on how these experiences influenced him, I appreciated the simple narrative style, leaving the reader to draw his/her own conclusions. This style made the book more like a collection of simple vignettes about a boy on a farm, except the reader remains thinking about the deeper meaning after reading.

The very last line of the book made me cry, thinking about the way the world changes and how we need to accept that, rather than clinging to our personal histories. I just loved this book, cover to cover.

This is about the lightest reading that one will ever get from a former President. In this easily readable and quite enjoyable, brisk-paced memoir, Jimmy Carter recounts his boyhood growing up in rural Plains, GA. Born in 1924, Carter focuses basically on the decade of the 1930s, with some very early memories from when he was just a few years old, up to his high school graduation in 1941. Following that, Carter spent one year at a local college, then a year at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, before embarking on what he thought would be a career in the U.S. Navy. Throughout this book, Carter is personal, honest when it hurts to be honest, and respectful of the people who were a part of his childhood - all characteristics that would surprise nobody given Carter's human and decent nature.

The dominant relationship here is Carter and his father. James Earl Carter, Sr. was a successful general store owner who later ran a large, complex farm. I have often heard media or politicians unfriendly to Carter refer to him as "a peanut farmer". That is misleading at best, and dismissive at worst, of the many aspects that Carter had to take control of when he abruptly resigned his Navy commission and returned to run the farm following his father's death in 1953. Carter's father did have a large holding peanuts, and they were one of the big sources of revenue. But so was the syrup mill operation, cotton, pecans, sweet potatoes, pigs, cattle, chickens, turkeys, corn, and many other crops. Carter Sr. had tenant farmers (all black) on his land and still operated a concession store on Saturdays. This was not some hayseed hick farmer who was barely literate. As was the custom, with young Jimmy being the oldest, and also the only son for quite some time, Sr. made Jimmy learn the farm operations. However, as Carter later mentions, his dad never specifically made mention of wanting him to take over the farm one day, and in fact encouraged him to join the Navy - repeatedly lobbying the Congressman of their district for an appointment.

But there was a lack of intimacy between them. Carter mentioned that very early in the book, and he returns to it at the end. Carter Sr. withheld praise for jobs well done, yet sometimes did not hesitate to inflict punishment for transgressions. It did not seem like, or Carter either does not remember or left it out, that they ever talked much about life in general, what Carter would do for a career, or enjoy many moments that were not related to something on the farm. I got the sense that Carter regrets this, especially since he was only in his late 20s when Sr. died of cancer. While he writes at length about his mother as well, and several other family members, the father is always the one who stands out from the rest. This might have been due to a mixture of the place and time, the personalities involved, and Carter's own yearnings.

He also writes about race, and how he really did not think much of segregation as a boy because that is all he, and anyone else living there, knew. To him as a child, it was just the way it was that his black friends could not attend the same school as he did, or sit next to him in the movie theater. Carter quickly developed a consciousness about this as he became a teenager, and of course actively opposed racism and segregation as an adult. Also, again given the time and place, his mother seemed to be remarkably progressive in her views on race, and even his dad, while not outspoken in any way about race matters, was known to treat blacks and whites equally in business dealings and did not approve of any racist organizations or sentiments. Of course, being the white owner of a farm, he operated from a clear position of authority with any black person who worked for him.

Not until the last few pages does Carter really talk about his two sisters, Gloria and Ruth, in more than passing references. I had wondered as I went through the book: why did he only bring them up when it related to some specific family function? Did he not get along with them? He somewhat answered that at the end: he did not really get along with them. Later as an adult he became close to Ruth. And his brother Billy, whose unfiltered comments tended to cause grief for Carter once he became famous, is not in the picture at all until the final couple of pages. Born many years after Carter, he simply was not alive for most of the events depicted in this book. This is a good read for anyone wanting to learn more about Carter and how his childhood experiences influenced his later life.

Grade: A-

I last visited Plains, Georgia more years ago than I care to admit, even though I’ve lived about a day trip away for a very long time. It’s out of the way enough that it’s not someplace you’re likely to just happen to find yourself in - if you’re in Plains, it’s probably because you purposely, specifically wanted to go there.

So after finally getting around to (purposely, specifically) paying a return visit to Plains this week, I thought it would be a good time to pull out this slim volume, which I’ve had for a long time but had never actually read, even though I know most of its stories from having read them cited in other books, articles and interviews with, by and about Jimmy Carter. 

The book on its own is absorbing enough - the title alone is the best and most poetically evocative of any of Carter’s many books - but it proved to be even more so when combined with a visit to its setting, seeing the very places I had just read about, or reading about the places I had just seen. The book’s early chapters are the best, where Carter’s writing is at its most vibrant and descriptive, telling simple stories but with a strong sense of place as he describes his early life at home, on his farm, with his family and friends and neighbors. With the pace of progress today, it’s remarkable to consider how the Depression-era rural south was so little changed from the time of Carter’s ancestors, and how someone alive today grew up in a time and place that feels like it could have been from a century earlier.

Very rarely in these early chapters does Carter even reference anything about his later life or his presidency. When he does on occasion, it’s almost jarring - I found myself so into his well-written prose and well-told stories that I almost forgot at times who the author is and who he became.

Carter’s stories about his upbringing are supplemented at times with diligent research, so it’s clear he put a lot of work into what amounts to much more than a simple collection of reminiscences - he frequently incorporates facts and statistics to provide a larger context around the time and the place he grew up. As the book progresses, Carter can sometimes get a bit too detailed about, say, farming techniques or his elders’ life stories or various happenings in the community - memories that might be somewhat more meaningful to him than to his readers. Even he seems to acknowledge that the book is a little less focused at times, referring to what he calls his “sometimes random recollections.” 

He even seems slightly unsure about the purpose of his own book - on the one hand he attempts to position it as shedding some light on the people and experiences that shaped him, while on the other hand he acknowledges that his siblings had the same family and similar experiences and turned out very differently, so maybe their upbringing was not as crucial to the people they became after all. That said, race relations, which did prove to be important in Carter’s later life, is an important subtext throughout the book. Carter’s difficult relationship with his father is more hinted at than expounded upon, but mostly because he seems to have chosen to focus on the positive in this book. Some of his memories seem a bit gauzy, some minor details were later found to be incorrect, and some very long direct quotes he attributes to others can't possibly be word-for-word accurate decades after they were supposedly spoken, but this is not a rigorous academic work of history, so one is inclined to give him a pass in how he chooses to tell his own life story.

Ultimately, the book reads like something a grandfather would pass down to his grandchildren, regardless of whether that grandfather turned out to be president. It’s a look at how life used to be, so the younger generations can appreciate where they came from. Indeed, Carter dedicates the book to his then-youngest grandchild, in the hopes it might help him “better comprehend the lives of his ancestors.” 

Early in the book, Carter observes about his hometown that “there is a sense of permanence in Plains.” And he’s right that change has come slowly to the town where he grew up and where he’s chosen to live out his last days. And yet, however slowly, change has and will come. When I last visited in the early 90’s, the local school and Carter’s boyhood home that he was later to write about in this book were derelict and abandoned, the town’s main street unassumingly included a modest antique and gift shop run by a Carter cousin, you could still fill up if you chose to at Billy Carter’s old gas station, and you might actually get to meet the Carters in town (and I did). While tourists still visited, the crowds that once flocked to the town during the Carter presidency had long since gone, and life in Plains simply went on. 

Today, the school and boyhood home (and Billy’s gas station) are museums, the Carters’ current home someday will be as well, and the main street is home to a smattering of… it would be uncharitable to call them tourist traps, so I won’t. And while Carter’s presence is still felt all over town, running into him in person is not going to happen anymore. So Plains itself is slowly changing again, as it goes through something of a transition from the home of a celebrated local resident, to a more permanent historical memorial to one of nearly four dozen Americans who held our country’s highest office for a time, as their lives and presidencies gradually fade ever further into the distant past. 

And this book, as written by a grandfather and dedicated to his grandson, ensures that his life and his history will be preserved, in his own words, for generations to come. It ends wistfully but not dejectedly, as Carter assumes none of his children or grandchildren will want to carry on farming their ancestral land as he did, but he understands and doesn't fault them for it. Life in Plains will go on regardless. Overall, this is a quick, enjoyable, accessible read, and also an excellent complement to a visit to Plains itself, allowing the reader and/or visitor to appreciate how important Plains has been to Carter - and how important Carter has and always will be to Plains.