The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

Kristin Kimball

ISBN 10: 1797107763 ISBN 13: 9781797107769

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio and Blackstone Publishing, 2019

Synopsis

From a graceful, luminous writer with an eye for detail (Minneapolis Star Tribune), this riveting memoir explores a year on a sustainable farm.

When Kristin Kimball left New York City to interview a dynamic young farmer named Mark, her world changed. On an impulse, she shed her city self and started a new farm with him on five hundred acres near Lake Champlain. The Dirty Life is the captivating chronicle of the couple s first year on Essex Farm, from the cold North Country winter through their harvest-season wedding in the loft of the barn.

Kristin and Mark s plan to grow everything needed to feed a community was an ambitious idea, and a bit romantic. It worked. Every Friday evening, all year round, over a hundred people travel to Essex Farm to pick up their weekly share of the whole diet --beef, pork, chicken, milk, eggs, maple syrup, grains, flours, dried beans, herbs, fruits, and forty different vegetables--produced by the farm. In The Dirty Life, Kristin discovers the wrenching pleasures of physical work, learns that good food is at the center of a good life, falls deeply in love, and finally finds the engagement and commitment she craved in the form of a man, a small town, and a beautiful piece of land.

About this title

About the Author

Kristin Kimball is a farmer and a writer living in upstate New York. Prior to farming, Kimball worked as a freelance writer, writing teacher, and as an assistant to a literary agent in New York City. A graduate of Harvard University, she and her husband Mark have run Essex Farm since 2003, where they live with their daughter, Jane.

Review

"A hearty, chromatic account of a meaningful accomplishment in farming."

-- "Kirkus Reviews"

"Kimball writes in vivid but unsentimental language, equal parts dirt and poetry."

-- "Burlington Free Press"

"Kimball is a graceful, luminous writer with an eye for detail... How lucky we are to be able to step into that world with no sweat. I wished for a hundred pages more."

-- "Minneapolis Star Tribune"

"In her beguiling memoir, Kimball describes the complex truth about the simple life in prose that is observant and lyrical, yet tempered by a farmer's lack of sentimentality."

--"Elle"

"The Dirty Life is a delightful, tumultuous, and tender story of the author's love affair with the man who becomes her husband and the farm they work together to restore."

--"Jeannette Walls, author of Half Broke Horses"

"If you want to understand the heart and soul of the new/old movement towards local food, this is the book you need."

--"Bill McKibben, author Eaarth"

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio and Blackstone Publishing
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1797107763
• ISBN 13: 9781797107769
• Binding: Audio CD
• Number of pages: 1