Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

Written by Richard Powers

Narrated by John Skelley

In the spring of 1914, renowned photographer August Sander took a photograph of three young men on their way to a country dance. This haunting image, capturing the last moments of
innocence on the brink of World War I, provides the central focus of Powers’s brilliant and compelling novel. As the fate of the three farmers is chronicled, two contemporary stories unfold. The young
narrator becomes obsessed with the photo, while Peter Mays, a computer writer in Boston, discovers he has a personal link with it.
The three stories connect in a surprising way and provide the reader with a mystery that spans a century of brutality and progress.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781980017240

Reviews for Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

[m.belljackson · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Fun (car drama) and compelling opening in Detroit with meeting the famous "Three Farmers" =the Rebel, the Sexy Dude, and the Virgin=photograph and the amazing photographer.Richard Powers captures the Grand Trunk Station and Diego Rivera's Mural.He follows each of the Farmers into World War II, alternating with a truly boring journalism job, with its later awkward pretense to Henry Ford's fortune.Boring Stock Brokers. boring Sarah Bernhardt. Boring red-head quest until Greene begins to speak on stage.Rampantly boring segue into Henry Ford.Still evocative at infrequent times yet it is way overly recursive,with endless coincidences, almost like an English lesson in using coincidence.Throughout, it oves steadily along to a way over-long plot with mostly unmemorable characters in confusing erudite,The cover is still amazing.

[bbcummings · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This book was lent to me by a friend.

It almost seems that if a book is hailed by the literary critics, there is about a 50% chance it is nothing more than post-modernist bullshit. The outstanding achievement of this one however, is that not only does the author succeed at making you hate what he wrote, but goes all the way to make you hate him as well. His name dropping of supposedly important people from philosophers to basketball players, together with his spewing of esoteric facts about arcane subjects, all done in a manner that assumes that if you don't know what he's talking about, then you are just an uncouth, uneducated peasant, come across as a gross insult to the typical reader. He persistently attempts to dazzle you with his own erudition, until you feel like your competing in a rigged game of Jeopardy, where he constantly rings the buzzer and has the right answer every time, while you stand like an intimidated fool.

On top of all that, the various interwoven tales, centered on a photograph, are disjointed and not very interesting, while the prose tends to ramble in the frenetic pretension of a condescending intellectual.

[seriousgrace · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance centers around a clever theme: a photograph. It begins with a contemporary first person account from a man traveling across the country. Seeking to occupy his time during a five hour layover in Detroit he visits an art museum and discovers a photograph that hijacks his imagination. It is a 1914-1915 photograph of three men identically dressed, identically posed, walking down a muddy road. The story then moves to third person as the narrative crawls inside the photograph and relives the three brothers's perspective on the brink of war. The final aspect of The Farmers is another contemporary story of a Boston based computer writer who finds the same photograph in his family heirlooms. While the story centers on a photograph, the central theme is technology and it's contribution to World War I. Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance intertwines fiction with nonfiction, mixing real people and events to a fictional landscape.