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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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