Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, a Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese by Brad Kessler

(Scribner, 256 pages, $24)

Goats are good company, says writer Brad Kessler. They follow their herders and don’t have to be driven. They pursue individual interests but never stray far from their companions. “The Igbo of Nigeria tell their children, if lost in the wilderness, follow a goat, she always knows the way back home,” he writes. Until he and his wife moved to Vermont and bought their first does, Kessler never appreciated how much of human culture was flavored by pastoralism. Amid the hard work came revelation after revelation: “To caper” is to dance like a goat. The word “tragedy” is a hat tip to the goat’s haunting cry and means, literally, “goat song.” Five letters of our alphabet are pictograms depicting “either a hoofed animal or a tool used to herd it.”

Kessler’s new book is as delightful as “a good chèvre,” said John Curran in the Associated Press. Rather than turning his back-to-the-land experience into a “Green Acres–style” comedy, the novelist has written about the actual work of herding and cheesemaking “with a poet’s eye for natural world detail” and a scholar’s eye for interesting detours. Though he keeps his prose plain, “sometimes the writing is so beautiful you want to reread sentences to savor it, like rolling a chunk of cheese around in your mouth before swallowing it.”

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Like generations of Vermonters before him, said Geoffrey Norman in The Wall Street Journal, Kessler learns that it’s hard to turn a profit from farming the state’s picturesque hills. “But none would call him a failure,” after reading how he benefits from converting his herd’s daily forage into cheese for the family table. Sure, it’s nice to gain fresh appreciation of the Greek deity Pan and why Keats called the goat-god the “dread opener of the mysterious doors leading to all knowledge.” But the greater reward of Kessler’s story is a reminder that we are all “strong enough and smart enough” to draw sustenance from the land, said Susan Salter Reynolds in the Los Angeles Times. During the period that we look over Kessler’s shoulder, “his entire existence is deepened. He is more at home in the world.”