Better Off
Eric Brende
There is something so alluring about the idea of just chucking it all, turning it all off, throwing it all away. Eric and Mary Brende decide to do just that. With only a few thousand dollars, they rent a house in a rural Amish-ish community. They make do as their neighbors do, doing most work by hand or with animal labor. Amazingly, Brende finds that this simple lifestyle actually takes less work than his former life. There are short-cuts and tricks to nearly everything. With less “need” for material goods, exotic foods, travel and gadgets there is much less need to work until exhaustion. A rather eye-opening look at how good the simple life can be.
The Money-less Man
Mark Boyle
With our current economy a mess, the growing realization that we as a society buy and waste a ton of stuff and the desire for a simpler lifestyle, Boyle’s book and site have garnered immense amounts of attention. By slowly paring down his life, Boyle becomes focused on what is necessary for survival and how money affects every aspect of our lives. Young, healthy and adventurous, Boyle announces he will live without buying a thing for the next year. His chronicles, while mostly upbeat, tell of an exhausting life. Barter and trade, often of work, gets some of his necessities. Other things, like much of his food, must be grown, cooked and processed by hand. Winter is particularly nasty. I had expected Boyle to tell of a monastic,...
At Least in the City Someone would Hear Me Scream
Wade Davis
Davis’s first chapter “Coonskin Cap” ties with http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/11/dogs-dont-understand-basic-concepts.html for funniest thing I’ve read in the last year. A flamingly fabulously gay man who escaped his home in the Ozarks to recreate himself as an anonymous city-dweller, Davis decides at 40 that he is doing it all wrong. After a number of not-particularly subtle signs, he and his boyfriend buy a cabin in Michigan. Davis wants to invent his own “Wade’s Walden”. The couple have no idea how tough life is in the dead of winter, deep in the woods. Davis makes a valiant attempt to assimilate, tries to loose his snarkiness and cynicism and to embrace nature. Sometimes it works,...
See You in a Hundred Years
See You in a Hundred Years – Logan Ward
We saw Ward speak at the WI Book Festival last month and he was equally as amusing as AJ Jacobs, though a bit more low-key. Having thoroughly burnt out on the hectic lifestyle of New York, Ward and his wife decide to drop out for a year and experiment with living from the land. The caveat being that everything they use/eat/own for a year is pre-1900. Like many folks, Ward and his wife found the idea of moving to the country and living the simple life idyllic. At times Ward does have moments, and even days, of pure bliss and peace. These are interspersed with hours of farm chores, pumping water, starting fires, grinding...
Home Work – Hand Built Shelters
Lloyd Kahn
I love this book. I love it so much I actually plan to buy it. With real money and everything. Fantastic, incredible, wonderful, hyperbole, burbbly, wee! Kahn’s book is a massive collection of hand built shelters of every sort of building material possible. And they are truly inspiring. There are fantastic homes built of light concrete (made with pumice) that can be carved into swirling shell shapes, tree houses (complete with power and water), a rock house built by a naked man over a decade of time, a teepee with underground power to run the photocopier, houses that have been off the power grid/running on solar for 35 years, two-story gypsy style caravan houses, adobe, mud, brick, tin, glass, driftwood, hay bale, sandbag, old bus –...