Reader's Digest, 1981
Topics include buying and building on land, harnessing energy from the sun, wind, water, and wood, raising your own vegetables and livestock (my favorite page is the one titled, "Sheep: Gentle Providers of Meat and Fleece"), how-to for canning, preserving, and cooking, skills and crafts, and recreation. I found some of the topics fascinating, even though I probably won't be farming fish in an above-ground pool in the backyard anytime soon. There is a lot of useful information in the book and it's a great starter volume for getting "back to basics" and learning about self-sustainability.
This book is very similar to a more recent book called Homesteading: A Back to Basics Guide to Growing Your Own Food, Canning, Keeping Chickens, Generating Your Own Energy, Crafting, Herbal Medicine, and More, which I'll review separately.
-----
Rodale Press, 2001
I really wanted to like this book with its catchy title and fun cover, but it wasn't quite as helpful as I would have liked. It seems more aimed towards the ultimate suburbanite living a life of upper middle class excess. It promises to point out "the environmental and personal costs of traditional, toxic household practices" and to offer "safe, natural, and easy alternatives." It does achieve this goal to some degree, but unfortunately, none of these alternatives (other than vinegar and baking soda) have frugality in mind. Not everyone can afford organic clothes, mattresses, and linens...and the advice to purchase an organic mattress and then wrap it in plastic to prevent dust mites seems a bit odd.
The book is full of tips and suggestions for living a more environmentally-friendly life and most are useful, but I was hoping for a book that gave more of an idea of what changes had the most impact or how to go about making sense of the numerous choices available (organic vs. local vs. no plastic, for example) in addition to doing so in the most frugal way. In the supermarket section, for example, it suggests the best way to avoid pesticides in foods is to simply spend more money to buy all organic! Overall, not a bad book for tips and ideas to get started, but this book should be a library check-out, not a purchase.
A side note: the book is published on acid-free, recycled paper, but the pages look pretty white to me and there's no information about how they got that way, even though the book mentions in several places to avoid chlorine products, including bleached paper.
The book is full of tips and suggestions for living a more environmentally-friendly life and most are useful, but I was hoping for a book that gave more of an idea of what changes had the most impact or how to go about making sense of the numerous choices available (organic vs. local vs. no plastic, for example) in addition to doing so in the most frugal way. In the supermarket section, for example, it suggests the best way to avoid pesticides in foods is to simply spend more money to buy all organic! Overall, not a bad book for tips and ideas to get started, but this book should be a library check-out, not a purchase.
A side note: the book is published on acid-free, recycled paper, but the pages look pretty white to me and there's no information about how they got that way, even though the book mentions in several places to avoid chlorine products, including bleached paper.
-----
