The book provides back story for McMinn’s blog, allowing a deeper, humorous look into the rewards and challenges of her...
Romance writer McMinn’s story of how she moved her family to a slanted little house in backwoods West Virginia following her divorce.
There, she connected with her father’s family’s 200-year history in Appalachia, and they provided stability and a resource of rural knowledge for the author. Plucked from the suburbs, McMinn wanted to live where she “could find chickens in the road.” She created a blog (chickensintheroad.com) featuring step-by-step instructions for recipes, country living and crafts, all documented with stunning photography. McMinn fell in love with a local man, whom she dubs “52,” his age when they met, and together, they bought a 40-acre farm with the idea of living off the land. In hindsight, she realizes the farm was “one of the most inhospitable, inaccessible, and unmanageable pieces of land on the planet.” And yet, “I loved that cold, muddy, hard life.” The farm presents countless challenges for the author, including creeks running under her unbridged road, slow-driving neighbors, and the farm’s icy, steep driveway. Winter also means power outages, cramped quarters and cold morning chores. McMinn balances tending goats, cows, sheep and chickens with raising her three children and dealing with an increasingly sullen partner. The book follows the arc of her romance with 52, from fluttery first kiss to the stage where McMinn knows she needs to leave him but can’t run the farm on her own. Meanwhile, readers learn how to make soap, test a cow for pregnancy and create tasty goat cheese. The book concludes with recipes for rural delicacies such as stuffed squash blossoms and summer vegetable pie and a section for making natural crafts and health products.
The book provides back story for McMinn’s blog, allowing a deeper, humorous look into the rewards and challenges of her rural life.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-222370-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
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
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