You Can Go Home Again: Adventures of a Contrary Life (Farming Biography) - Hardcover

Logsdon, Gene

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0253334195 ISBN 13: 9780253334190

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 1998

Synopsis

"This is an enjoyable book that, for a brief while, will take many of its readers home." ―News-Journal (Mansfield, OH)

"[Logsdon] offers warmth and insight . . The simpler life is within our reach―if we will choose it." ―Booklist

"This is a quiet, reflective work that describes in some detail the difficulty of developing and maintaining a lifestyle supported by the land, something easier planned than maintained. . . . a memoir of the spiritual path of one escapee." ―Bloomsbury Review

"Deliciously irreverent, endearingly self-deprecating, full of good humor, Gene Logsdon's latest work is his personal testament to home, the retaining of which has been (Carol aside) the passion of his life." ―Ohio Ecological Food & Arm Association News

"Gene Logsdon has lived by failing according to most people's standards of success, and has made a good life. A good book, too. I like You Can Go Home Again (to name one reason of several) because it comes from experience. It has to do, not with speculation or theory or wishful thinking, but with what is possible." ―Wendell Berry

"Gene Logsdon demonstrates once again that a combination of intelligence, scholarship, passion, and fervent patriotism can equal only one characteristic these days, a contrary mind of a high order." ―Wes Jackson, The Land Institute

"In this vigorous memoir of his search for the good life, Gene Logsdon tells us why America's agrarian values matter to our future as well as to our past. Living simply, respecting the land, taking pleasure from the work of our hands, supplying many of our own needs, acting as neighbors―those values have not been lost, they've only been displaced, shoved to the margins. And Logsdon shows how we might draw them back to the center of our lives." ―Scott Russell Sanders

Here is a book for everyone who has dreamed about going back to the land to live a simpler more meaningful life. Gene Logsdon's story embodies both the frustrations and longing so many of us feel as we search for our essential selves and a happy harmonious economic existence. The measure of his courage―and contrariness―is that he has been successful. In You Can Go Home Again, he tells us what motivated him and what success has meant.

About this title

About the Author

Gene Logsdon is the author of sixteen books, including The Contrary Farmer and A Contrary Farmer's Invitation to Gardening, hundreds of magazine articles, and a weekly newspaper column. He writes and farms near Upper Sandusky, Ohio, where he lives with his family.

Reviews

Logsdon--the contrary farmer, as one of his earlier (1994) books' title styles him--offers warmth and insight in his autobiography. He describes the pressures that compelled him to leave the Ohio farm of his childhood for seminary training and the epiphany that propelled him back to secular life to pursue the dream of returning to the lifestyle of his childhood. He discusses the slow death of the agrarian lifestyle at the hands of agribusiness and clearly delineates the economic and political forces destroying small farming in America. But he doesn't just talk. For years he has lived the contrary lifestyle he advocates, using ecologically informed farming techniques and the agricultural wisdom of his background on a sustainable, highly profitable 32-acre "garden farm" in the valley in which he grew up. And he provides not just a fascinating glimpse of a lifestyle that has nearly disappeared but also a blueprint for those who want to lead a similar way of life. The simpler life is within our reach--if we will choose it. Bonnie Johnston

Edition details

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0253334195
• ISBN 13: 9780253334190
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224