Synopses & Reviews
"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 and 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.
Synopsis
Gene Logsdon's story embodies both the frustration and longing so many individuals feel as they search for their essential selves and a harmonious life. The measure of his courage--and contrariness--is that he has been successful. In "You Can Go Home Again", he tells readers what has motivated him and what success has meant.
Synopsis
For Logsdon, "home" means the establishment of a pattern of homes, all working together to produce a home-based economy as a solid foundation under the larger economy gone crazy with paper money. Home for Logsdon is a local community tied to other local communities. But Logsdon's philosophy is mostly between the lines. What he writes about are the sad, funny, and sometimes harrowing adventures of those who live seemingly humdrum lives: understanding creeks, shepherding sheep; coping with blizzards; winning softball tournaments; losing sanity at rock concerts; hiding in haystacks; enjoying Christmas; surviving a buggy ride; overcoming grief, not to mention absentminded professors, dictatorial editors, and fervid priests; and why maybe we should go to church in our underwear. What transpires is a lovely picture of a very American life.
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.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1, Homesick
Chapter 2, Lost
Chapter 3, Realizing the Truth
Chapter 4, The Log Cabin in the Woods
Chapter 5, Suburban Halfway House
Chapter 6, Settling In
Chapter 7, Killdeers Woman
Chapter 8, The Blizzard
Chapter 9, Lessons the "Crick" Taught Me
Chapter 10, The Waters of Home
Chapter 11, The Home Team
Chapter 12, The Homespun Sporting Life
Chapter 13, Home for Christmas
Chapter 14, A Buggy Ride
Chapter 15, Alone With My Thoughts
Chapter 16, Home Villages
Chapter 17, A Solitary Farmer Goes to a Rock Concert
Chapter 18, You Can Step Into the Same Haystack Twice
Chapter 19, The Shepherd