Memoirs: Sustainable Living

What happens when two New Yorkers (one an ex-drag queen) do the unthinkable: start over, raise a herd of kids, and get a little dirty? A happy series of accidents and a doughnut-laden escape upstate take Josh Kilmer-Purcell and his partner, Brent Ridge, to the doorstep of the magnificent (and fabulously for sale) Beekman Mansion. And so begins their transformation from uptight urbanites into the two-hundred-year-old-mansion-owning Beekman Boys.

Author Barbara Kingsolver and her family abandoned the industrial-food pipeline to live a rural life--vowing that, for one year, they'd only buy food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is an enthralling narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat.

"Cathedral of the Wild" is a story of transformation that inspires a great appreciation for the beauty and order of the natural world. With conviction, hope, and humor, Varty makes a passionate claim for the power of the wild to restore the human spirit.

In this profoundly moving memoir, Mr. Owita teaches author Carol Wall how to find grace amid heartbreak and to accept that beauty exists because it is fleeting--as in her garden, as in life.

When her college-bound daughter leaves home, Lynn Darling, widowed over a decade earlier, finds herself alone and utterly lost, with no idea of what she wants or even who she is. Searching for answers, she leaves New York for the solitary woods of Vermont. Removed from the familiar, cocooned in the natural world, her only companions a new dog and a compass, she hopes to develop a sense of direction, both in the woods and in her life.

Julene Bair has inherited part of a farming empire and fallen in love with a rancher from Kansas's beautiful Smoky Valley. She means to create a family, provide her son with the father he longs for, and preserve the Bair farm for the next generation, honoring her own father's wish and commandment: "Hang on to your land!"

When Novella Carpenter--captivated by the idea of backyard self-sufficiency as the daughter of two back-to-the-earth hippies--moves to a ramshackle house in inner-city Oakland and discovers a weed-choked, garbage-strewn abandoned lot next door, she closes her eyes and pictures heirloom tomatoes, a beehive, and a chicken coop. What starts out as a few egg-laying chickens leads to turkeys, geese, and ducks. And not long after, along came two 300-pound pigs. And no, these charming and eccentric animals aren't pets. Novella is raising these animals for dinner.

"The Orchard" is the story of a street-smart city girl who must adapt to a new life on an apple farm after she falls in love with Adrian Curtis, the golden boy of a prominent local family whose lives and orchards seem to be cursed. Married after only three months, young Theresa finds life with Adrian on the farm far more difficult and dangerous than she expected. Rejected by her husband's family as an outsider, she slowly learns for herself about the isolated world of farming, pesticides, environmental destruction, and death, even as she falls more deeply in love with her husband, a man she at first hardly knew and the land that has been in his family for generations.

Author Gene Logsdon-whom Wendell Berry once called "the most experienced and best observer of agriculture we have"-has a notion: That it is a little easier for gardeners and farmers to accept death than the rest of the populace. Why? Because every day, farmers and gardeners help plants and animals begin life and help plants and animals end life.

Founder Ellie Laks started The Gentle Barn after adopting a sick goat from a run-down petting zoo in 1999. Some two hundred animals later (including chickens, horses, pigs, cows, rabbits, emus, and more), The Gentle Barn has become an extraordinary nonprofit that brings together a volunteer staff of community members and at-risk teens to rehabilitate abandoned and/or abused animals.

A chronicle of one full season on a farm, with all its small triumphs and inevitable setbacks, "A Farm Dies Once a Year" is a meditation on work--the true nature of it, and on taking pride in it--and a son's reckoning with a father's legacy. Above all, it is a striking portrait of how one man builds, sows, and harvests his way into a new understanding of the risks necessary to a life well-lived.

Part how-to, part personal memoir, "The Big Tiny" is an utterly seductive meditation on the benefits of slowing down, scaling back, and appreciating the truly important things in life. More-than ten years ago, a near-death experience abruptly reminded sustainability advocate and pioneer Dee Williams that life is short. So she sold her sprawling home and built an eighty-four-square-foot house - on her own, from the ground up.

Novella Carpenter picks up the phone one day to receive some disturbing news: her father has officially gone missing. Carpenter's father, George, a back-to-the-land homesteader and troubled Korean War veteran, has spent decades battling his inner demons while largely absenting himself from his children's lives. Though George is ultimately found, Carpenter is forced to confront the truth: her time with her dad, now seventy-three years old, is limited, and the moment to restore their relationship is now.