Don’t let Amundsen’s self-deprecating humor fool you into taking this book lightly. In between capers, she makes a nuanced...
One family’s attempt to get out of the rat race and into the poultry race.
For years, former Reader’s Digest Association editor and Minneapolis Star Tribune contributor Amundsen and her husband, Jason, were just a normal, educated middle-class couple with middle-class lives in the middle of America. Despite this, readers will root for them because they dreamed of something other than being—well—in the middle. They decided to vacate a seemingly underwhelming existence and embark on a journey through “middle agriculture,” those farms situated between factory farms and boutique operations. The idealism of Amundsen’s husband became the fulcrum on which their lives began to pivot. Driven by decency and principled morals—and perhaps the likelihood of suffering a “boredom aneurysm” in their “Beige Rambler” Amundsen considered her “forever house”—Jason proposed to start a midsized, commercial, pasture-raised egg farm even though their main experience in egg farming consisted of caring for a few pet hens who lived in their garage. The book opens with a scene of their first shipment of commercially raised chickens that don’t quite know how to be chickens (“until today, they have NEVER SEEN THE SUN”). As we soon learn, the Amundsens don’t quite know how to be chicken farmers. The author’s skepticism and her husband’s optimism collide to create a laughable, empathetic tale of re-education for (wo)man and beast. Behind the humor, however, Amundsen reveals the complex and sometimes-alarming methods by which farms operate in the U.S. The author ably synthesizes a large amount of detailed information, including the important differences among pasture-raised, organic, and cage-free eggs. She also shows how her family’s struggle in the amorphous landscape between big agriculture and small-scale farming is not unlike the struggle of the American middle class in general.
Don’t let Amundsen’s self-deprecating humor fool you into taking this book lightly. In between capers, she makes a nuanced plea to respect local farms and the animals that populate them.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59463-422-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avery
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
