Publishers
Weekly
April 23, 2007
“ Manhattan freelance writer Ward and his wife, Heather, faced a steep
learning curve when they abandoned harried, technology-driven lives for a year
not just in the country but in the country as it was a century ago. Their mantra
was, ‘If it didn’t exist in 1900, we will do without,’ and
they did—no electricity, no telephone, no computer. This breezy account
of their stubbornly quixotic odyssey begins in June 2000, with Logan exhausted
pumping water from a well, ineptly milking cantankerous goats and confronting
his fear of a 2,000-pound Percheron, while Heather coped with the cooking stove’s
suffocating heat, her fear of snakes and hand-scrubbing two-year-old Luther’s
cloth diapers. Their garden, planted late, was soon parched by drought and plagued
by pests, the most severe of several crises, since it was their winter food.
Ward writes candidly about how tempers flared and sexual intimacy vanished in
the early months of their adventure, but the stress of a daunting new experience
soon settled into the comfort of routine, as the couple canned dozens of quarts
of produce once the rains returned and forged friendships with curious, ultimately
supportive country neighbors. This lyrical account of keeping the 21st century
at bay is more real, and more rewarding, than any survival TV show.”
Library Journal (starred review)
July 15, 2007
“ How many of us have wished for a simpler life, free of high-pressure
careers, traffic and communication gridlock, pollution, terrorist threats, etc.?
Adventure travel writer Ward (An Explorer's Guide to the Field
Museum) did more
than wish. With his lawyer wife and two-year-old son, he left high-pressure New
York City and moved to Virginia to live (as much as possible) as they would have
lived in 1900. One of the more amusing parts of Ward's account is how much modern
technology was required to prepare the family for living without modern technology.
But live in the early 1900s they did, and the reader, courtesy of Ward's vivid
prose and gift for characterization, lives with them. From learning the mysterious
ways of farm animals to deciphering the riddles of a wood-burning stove, from
realizing the possibility of self-sufficiency to becoming part of a community,
from trying to rescue a marriage of detached individuals to celebrating a truly
committed union, we follow this family's story, finding that we are as reluctant
as they for it to end. It is difficult to imagine any library, public or academic,
that would not want to purchase this book, informed throughout by Ward's wry
sense of humor, passion, and objectivity.” —M.C. Duhig, Carnegie
Lib. of Pittsburgh
The Birmingham News
July 22, 2007
The
Raleigh News and Observer
July 29, 2007
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