"This compelling memoir is by turns charming and chilling. As the artist-author restores a forty-acre farm field and builds a house in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, making the mistakes of a city slicker but somehow bumbling through to success, he also uncovers the story of the Battle of Cross Keys that was fought on his land 125 years earlier. Alternating chapters focus contrapuntally on the 1980s and 1860s, keeping the reader glued to these fascinating pages."

– James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom

Past and present interface as Svenson juxtaposes depictions of the battle with accounts of his struggle to produce a crop of hay. The death-grapples of blue and gray regiments echo in Svenson's modern-day war against mini-malls, pesticides and similar modern detritus. This chronicle is a gem--a moving military pastoral whose excellence commends it to a wide audience.

– Publishers Weekly

“You don’t have to be an amateur farmer or a Civil War buff to admire what Peter Svenson achieves in Battlefield. . . . The reader watches with increasing fascination as the Union and Confederate ghosts of a small but deadly skirmish on June 8, 1862 come alive again between the rows of the author’s golden harvest. It’s quite a literary accomplishment.”

– Herbert Mitgang, The New York Times

“Vivid . . . . The chapters of warfare and farm work ultimately knit together; the reader’s understanding of the forty acres makes the battle more comprehensible and more terrible, and the battle’s horrors render the current peaceful state of the land more precious.”

– The New Yorker

Now with a new foreword and afterword by the author, Battlefield: Farming a Civil War Battleground is a true-life memoir that tells two stories in parallel - one of attempting to revive long-neglected hay farmland, and one of the Civil War "Battle of Cross Keys", which once took place on that farmland. In the "Battle of Cross Keys", Confederate forces blocked a Union advance and earned a victory fo General Stonewall Jackson. Author Peter Svenson speaks at length of searching for the best way to honor and comme1norate the men who sacrificed their lives on his forty acres. Exceprts from numerous primary historical sources pepper this narrative, highly recommended especially for Civil War shelves and reading lists.

– MBR Bookwatch