Provocative reading for anyone who has ever yearned for a life of radical simplicity.
Bright update on the perennial back-to-the-land movement.
In this engaging, honest, and deeply personal account, Outside correspondent Sundeen (The Man Who Quit Money, 2012, etc.) tells the stories of three American families who have pursued alternative ways of living. Eschewing conveniences, materialism, and “the compromises of contemporary life,” each has joined a movement consisting of “local food and urban farms, bike coops and time banks and tool libraries, permaculture and guerrilla gardening, homebirthing and homeschooling and home cooking.” In researching their adventures in homesteading, Sundeen hoped to learn for himself how to lead a good life. Though his personal reflections meander, sometimes annoyingly, his superb reporting produces revealing portraits of modern hippies: Ethan Hughes and Sarah Wilcox, pursuing off-the-grid lives of secular utopianism and religious activism as farmers in the intentional community of Possibility Alliance in La Plata, Missouri; Olivia Hubert and Greg Willerer, working to create “a new economic model of food distribution” through Brother Nature Produce, an urban farm in violence-wracked Detroit; and Luci Brieger and Steve Elliott, a middle-aged farming couple in Victor, Montana, with three kids and a $40,000 yearly income, who have rejected the internet and popular culture in “uncompromising pursuit of an ethical life” in the local food movement. These unsettlers’ early backgrounds vary from privileged to poor to hippie, but Sundeen shows how all take “true joy in work,” seek constructive ways of living in society, and reap considerable rewards in their simple lives of voluntary poverty. The author is especially good at showing the difficulty of raising children in a connected society while wondering, as one iconoclast says here, “how do we fight the Man if we continue to buy his cheeseburgers?” He places these often inspiring, sometimes self-righteous families firmly in the American utopian tradition and traces the pervasive influences of authors from Tolstoy to Helen and Scott Nearing to Wendell Berry.
Provocative reading for anyone who has ever yearned for a life of radical simplicity.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59463-158-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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