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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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