Customer Reviews

My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(26)

 

 

Like most of the reviewers, I saw Manny Howard on Colbert. He was funny and self-deprecating, and he seemed like the perfect guy to tell a story of ambition gone wrong. Turns out, though, the book went far more wrong than the farm.

I can't think of another book as disjointed -- as completely discombobulated -- as this. Roosters are about to be castrated in one chapter, but chapters later are still crowing. Obvious questions such as 'how much did this fiasco cost?' go unanswered, although oddly he does mention it in the original magazine article. He mentions calloo, many times, and then decides he should identify the unfamiliar plant... a hundred pages later. Anecdotes go rambling out of control. He drags in Wendell Berry's ghost, using long swathes of Berry's writing, ostensibly as a literary device, but clearly for padding. He throws in pages of poorly integrated Brooklyn history. He rambles about the start of his relationship with his wife. He grasps at any thread that will add pages, because, it turns out, aside from his horrific animal husbandry tales, he doesn't really have anything to say.

I agree with the reviewers who point out that his treatment of the livestock is vile, and that he and his wife come across as horribly unpleasant. But the real problem is that the book itself is an unstructured mess. Maybe the tornado that flattened his garden blew away his notes. Maybe he was too busy feuding with his wife to remember to take any.

Or maybe he just grabbed his advance and forgot that he was supposed to deliver a book..

Howard has a disturbing tendency to fly into a rage and beat animals to death with his bare hands, no aptitude for them, no interest in them, no inclination to research their care, and no empathy for them. He shouldn't be allowed to keep animals.

I read the book because he appeared on the Colbert Report and he seemed very funny. His book is anything but funny.

The first several chapters tell about how smart, successful and sexy his wife is. The rest of the book is about how he repeatedly makes bad decisions, with his garden and throughout his life.

He repeatedly makes choices that anybody with a hint of common sense would avoid (eg, - he repeatedly purchases animals before he has housing for them.) He repeatedly purchases tools and materials for gardening systems he'll never use.

If you're hoping to learn anything about gardening look elsewhere. If you're looking for a fun and/or funny story about gardening look elsewhere. If you're looking for something entertaining to read look elsewhere.

If you've read the New York magazine article (Sept. 10, 2007) on which this book is based, you might be eager to settle down with this account of the author's attempt to eat only food that he has grown or raised for 30 days. The article is well researched and charmingly written, and the author comes across as diligent and self-effacing, and a bit of a bumbler. He's no Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle) and he knows it.

Yet within the first few pages of his book, Mr. Howard reveals that he divorced his first wife, got his girlfriend (current wife) pregnant and urged her to abort the baby, became bored in the working world and dropped out, downloads porn in his spare time, and bought his daughter a dozen birds and left them all to kill each other... oh, all except for the one that he smashes against a wall in a drunken rage.

I had to read that part about the birds again, it was so shocking. What in this man's character would compel me to read on? Read on I did, though, hoping that through his urban farming experiment, Mr. Howard would learn a few lessons about humility, compassion and responsibility. Sadly, he does not.

His cruelty to animals is breathtaking -- time after time, he acquires animals without any knowledge of how to care for them, and the result is always the same -- they die. Or, he kills them in particularly brutal ways, like smashing them against whatever hard surface is at hand. He beats a rabbit about to give birth until it is paralyzed and then, after she has given birth, cruelly moves her water dishes out of her reach. "Something good has to come of this grotesque error," he writes before he kills her.

His drunken rages repeatedly rear their ugly head. And, he demeans the very people who could help him, writing in a shorthand that puts people in their place -- the feed store owner, for example, is "Cowcatcher." He professes to love his wife, yet takes digs at her, repeatedly referring to her "uniform" or her "business rig," meaning she's dressed well for a job she excels at and pays the household bills with. Unlike her husband. He mentions that his name is not on the deed to their house... I'm sure that will be an important fact at some future date.

At one point, just before Mr. Howard leaves a squirrel to die slowly of starvation in a trap -- as a self-styled "warning" to other squirrels -- he asks himself, "Why haven't I seen this obvious disaster?" It's a question any reader might ask of him.

I was very excited to read this book after seeing him interviewed on Stephen Colbert. The author has a very dry sense of humor which is great. However, halfway through the book I was tired of reading about multiple cases of animal cruelty. Such instances include negligence in caring for birds he got as a gift for his child followed by manually and deliberately killing them, trapping a squirrel and letting it sit without food or water for 2-3 days before drowning it, and letting a rabbit suffer to die by being eaten inside out by maggots instead of putting it out of it's misery (a veterinarian, a swift head shot, he'll even drowning it would have been better). I had to stop reading halfway through as I really hated to hear him treat animals that way. Maybe he did it for shock value; if so he's a jackass. Maybe you'll read the book just to hear those stories; in which case you're a jackass.

I decided to buy the book after seeing an interview on The Colbert Report; the guy was so hilarious I thought the book would be just as good. I am about a third of the way through and don't know if I will be able to bring myself to finish it. So far it is not amusing in anyway. I grew up in Denver and now live on a farm. Having grown a garden in and out of the city, I can honestly say that this guy is an idiot, spent way more money than needed, caused way more work than necessary, and I am surprised that, looking at the pictures in the book, he actually managed to grow anything. As to his methods, he should have driven out to the country and talked to a real farmer instead of trying to learn how to do it from a book.

I made the mistake of buying this book just by the title alone, I should have read the reviews first. I thought it was going to be a story about one of those naive city folk who decide to live more simply. It was bad enough that this guy bought a flock of finches just for his kid's birthday, but he didn't even bother to care for them and they all died. When I got to the part where the guy slams a canary against a wall to be rid of him, I had to read the passage twice to make sure what I was reading was correct. At this point I stopped reading, returned the book and got my money back. Thank goodness I never got to the other episodes of his documented animal cruelty mentioned by the other reviewers. Forget this book, and please someone call the ASPCA on this guy!

This author seems to be proud of his own stupidity and, worst of all, brags about beating a pregnant rabbit to death with a dust pan (after first paralyzing her). I hope his writing career fails as miserably as his farming career did. Please avoid this guy and his book!

This book was well-written and did provide a good perspective for others who might want to start a "farm" in their backyard, which is why I gave it two stars. The problem was that I couldn't connect with the author and, since he is the narrator as well, that was a bit of a problem. I felt like he was trying to be funny but it mostly fell short. And some of his interactions with animals said it all -- like asking someone if they kicked a dog and the person said no, that the dog was acting according to its instincts (DUH) and the author thought it was humorous when he took a live chicken, dumped it in a department store and then inconvenienced someone at the store (on Christmas Eve, no less) by saying he'd be over to pick up then chicken knowing he wasn't going to. That's not funny in so many ways. Stuff like that left a pallor over the book. Plus, I don't care what he might say, he does not like his wife. In fact, she came off as annoying and whining. Maybe she really is like that (how would I know?) -- but I couldn't help but feel that he was using the story to get back at her by painting her in such a bad light.

I found the book an amazing quick read. I don't know how I happened to add this book to my wishlist, but it was a mistake.

In the first few pages I found out how he avoided work, got divorced and tried to get his (then) girlfriend to commit an abortion. I expected from his ramblings that he was writing for word count, rather than quality. So, I omitted the narcissistic portions and other areas that were otherwise left as fluff.

That left a bit about his back yard having about 7 feet of clay on top, and how his yard did not even grow grass before his ill-fated effort. It can take years to get garden soil to perform. Had he done any serious, meaningful research, he would have learned about raised-bed gardening. That would have spared him a weekend of digging a dry well, etc. and had a productive garden the first time around.

It might have been nice if he included anything meaningful. Instead, it's the rambling of a self-loathing Gen-Xer.

I stopped reading because I realized this was the worst example of writing I've encountered. Fortunately he had connections in publishing (including his wife) so he could get a contract. Unfortunately for us, they enabled.

Minus one star for rambling. Minus one star for narcissism. Minus two stars for not providing meaningful information on the subject. I would have removed another star, but Amazon won't let me.