Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2
Jane Poynter
The controversial creation of Biosphere 2 still lives on today. This radical experiment to have eight people live in a sealed environment for two years was the brainchild of ecologist John Allen, and funded by billionaire Ed Bass. Based on …
Alexander Langlands
For those of us who like working with our hands, there is nothing as satisfying as making a useful and beautiful object we can use for years. Cræft, being skilled at creating unique, hand-made items sourced from nature locally, has nearly disappeared. Once, being a craftsperson who could …
Caitlin Doughty
The magnificent, hilarous and always fascinating mortician Caitlin Doughty (Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes) is back with another intriguing look at death.
Death is inevitable. But the way Americans and many in the west act, it is something shameful …
Jake Hobson
Do you have some scraggly, overgrown trees or looming bushes you’ve been meaning to trim back? Niwaki, the Japanese equivalent of topiary, is a fun alternative to the simple (often ruthless) trimming most Americans give their bushes. Cloud pruning, the simplest form, follows the contours of a bush’s …
Michael Perry
Seed catalogs are responsible for more unfulfilled fantasies than Enron and Penthouse combined.
Perry’s Truck is a love song to his vintage truck, but also to so many other parts of his life – gardening, his neighbors, fellow fire fighters, family, seed catalogs, The Joynt bar, his fledgling …
Thomas Thwaites
Could you build a toaster? “Sure,” you say. “I’d just get a kit on amazon.” No, from scratch? “Well yes, I could get all the parts online, probably Ebay, and cobble one together.” No, from real scratch. Mining the ore and refining it. Forming each delicate piece. Creating …
Kevin Kelly
Do you need to know where to get transparent concrete, Amish tools, color-changing LEDS, Japanese woodworking tools and so much more? Neither do I! But that didn’t stop me from putting so many bookmarks in this fascinating book that it ended up looking like a hedgehog. Modeled on …
J
eff Yeager
Lesson number one rule in Yeager’s amusing and instructive books: cheapskate is a GOOD word. I couldn’t agree more. Rather than going down the usual money-saving how-to roads, namely the “how to save money by reusing old string and cardboard boxes to make shoes” and the “just …
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 …
Josh Kilmer-Purcell
This is one of those books that has me vacillating wildly between seething jealousy and abject horror. When Josh and Brent, overworked Manhattanites, find the perfect old mansion for a song it seems like their dreams have come true. The first months of farming and spending weekends at …
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 …
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 …
Logan Ward
We saw Ward speak at the WI Book Festival and he as 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 …
