Strom gives the reader a look, literally, through an enormous microscope and then slowly pulls back the lens. . . . This creative organization is one of the book's strengths because it connects the environment, people, and politics in a way that many environmental histories claim to do, but few actually accomplish. -- Journal of Southern History Historians interested in environmental history and the new South will find the well-researched Making Catfish Bait out of Government Boys an important addition to the historiography. Despite the complicated science involved in tick eradication the work is accessible and timely, especially considering the issues surrounding the proper extent of federal power. The narrative, with plenty of shotgun blasts and dynamite explosions alongside helpful maps, makes this work an engaging and worthwhile read. -- Southwestern Historical Quarterly Extends the story of southern yeomen well into the twentieth century and uses the tick eradication issue as a window into their changing world. Anyone interested in the changing landscape of the American South will want to read Strom's fine and engaging book. -- Mark Wetherington * author of Plain Folk's Fight: The Civil War and Reconstruction in Piney Woods Georgia * Raises important new questions about the unusual role that yeomen played in the modernization of American agriculture. Strom offers intriguing insights into the problematic nature of technological and scientific change: while such change might 'lift all boats' in the abstract and long term, in the short term many supposed beneficiaries paid a steep price. She does a great job of telling that side of the story and of showing how resistance to new ideas and practices also helps shape their ultimate form and impact. -- Deborah Fitzgerald * author of Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture * Claire Strom has woven together a wonderful tale of protozoa, insects, cattle, farmers, bureaucrats, politics, and geography revolving around the New South initiative to eradicate tick-borne Texas fever (babesiosis), the range of which roughly matched the contours of the South. This is a wide-ranging monograph in both topical and spatial terms, but Strom neatly ties everything together by using the southern yeoman farmer as the lens through which to view southern development. -- Georgia Historical Quarterly Making Catfish Bait out of Government Boys makes an important contribution to the agricultural, political, and cultural history of the South. -- Journal of Mississippi History