Let me be perfectly frank and say that I am a member of the choir to whom Fasenfest is preaching. We grow about 70% of our own produce. We have brought home live pigs & geese which later made an appearance on the dinner table. My husband is an unreconstructed back-to-the-lander, farming not only our own land, but the neighbor's plot as well. We buy whole foods in bulk, we preserve, we compost. In short, we embrace the lifestyle that Fasenfest is promoting. She takes it further in this book than I have gone, and the information she imparts is both sane and valuable. There's more than a little philosophizing, and a lot of lovely hands-on practical advice. It's a huge bonus that she's working on her urban farm in my own neck of the woods.

This is a book to have on the shelves, a book to reread every January during the lull in the garden, a book to refer to every couple of months during the crazy harvest season, a book to buy and give as a gift to every young person just starting out.

I'm buying this one, if only for the garden fruitcake recipe and the transcendent passage about the calculus of college for the ordinary kid.

( )

This book didn't really grab me, but for purely logistical purposes. If I'm going to read a narrative I want a book I can hold in one or two hands easily, not a huge hulking textbook. I figured this was going to be a more nuts-and-bolts type of work but that is not the case. ( )

I've won a copy through First Reads and look forward to reading it.