A beautiful, moving memoir of a boys coming of age, infused with a deep love of the land, from one of Canadas most cherished and acclaimed writers.In Of This Earth, Rudy Wiebe gives vivid life again to the vanished world of Speedwell, Saskatchewan, an isolated, poplar-forested, mostly Mennonite community and Rudys first home. Too young to do heavy work, Rudy witnessed a way of life that was soon to disappear. And we experience with him the hard labour of clearing the stony, silty bushland; the digging out of precious wells one bucket of dirt at a time; sorrow at the death of a beloved sister; the disorienting searches for grazing cattle in the vast wilderness sloughs and the sweet discovery of the power of reading.Rare personal photographs (reproduced throughout the book) and the fragile memories of those who are left give shape to the story of Mennonite immigrants building a life in Canada, the growth and decline of the small Speedwell community, the sway of religion, and a young boys growing love of the extreme beauty of the aspen forests as well as how all these elements came to inform his destiny as a writer.A hymn to a lost place and a distant time, Of This Earth follows the best of memoirs in the tradition of Sharon Butalas The Perfection of the Morning and W. G. Sebalds Austerlitz. It is an evocation of the Canadian west that only a writer of Rudy Wiebes powers could summon.From the Hardcover edition.