Week 16: The Dirty Life

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The Dirty Life: a Memoir of Farming, Food, and Love, by Kristin Kimball

It's another organic farming manifesto! I like reading books about how to get back to the land; I just don't think I'd be any good at it myself, since I'm a rotten gardener. (Sorry Mom.) Come the Apocalypse, I plan to survive by sewing and educating children in exchange for food.

Anyway, this is the story of a typical ironic New York writer who falls in love with an organic farmer with radical ideas. They move to upstate New York, to a run-down 50-acre farm, and turn it into a sort of uber-CSA farm. The Dirty Life describes how the author met her husband and how they started the farm. It was pretty enjoyable, but there was way more information about their relationship than I needed.

This isn't a how-to book, though, it's a memoir. And it's pretty good if you like that sort of thing, which I mostly do, as long as it doesn't have made-up stuff about utopian Neolithic societies! Next up: Farm City, about an organic farmer in the Oakland ghetto. She's sounding kind of smug, though...

Comments

  1. Nancy LeekApril 18, 2011 at 4:25 PM

    If you are going to keep reading these down-on-the-farm books, you are going to have to get yourselves some dirt, some chickens, and some overalls.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanApril 18, 2011 at 6:34 PM

    I'm going to let Katie do that.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Cheree MooreJune 15, 2011 at 5:42 PM

    I love this type of memoir. Definitely adding it to my "to read" list.

    ReplyDelete

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