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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
In the late 1960s, swept up in the spirit of the times, young literary scholar Wallace Kaufman banded with friends to purchase 330 acres of North Carolina forest and found their version of utopia--a low-impact, covenant-heavy development that their rural neighbors would come to call "Hippie Town." Kaufman's utopia fell apart, as such places tend to do, under the usual pressures, but he stayed in the woods, eventually losing his academic job but finding plenty of other work to do as a sometime builder and land appraiser. His tales of how to go about making a home in the backcountry may give would-be back-to-the-landers pause, but they're certainly instructive and full of useful details. (Who knew that "the average small house requires over 50,000 nails," or that a builder hammering by hand would need to devote nearly two weeks to driving those nails in?) Kaufman is a keen observer of the ways of nature, discussing the natural history of trees, the habits of flying squirrels and copperheads, and the relentless cycle of life and death. An evident conservationist, he also finds room for extractive activities such as logging, mining, and hunting, and he argues for individual ownership of the land, maintaining that "the world's greatest environmental tragedies are largely on public lands or lands to which no one has a secure title or protection for a claim."
In the late 1960s, swept up in the spirit of the times, young literary scholar Wallace Kaufman banded with friends to purchase 330 acres of North Carolina forest and found their version of utopia--a low-impact, covenant-heavy development that their rural neighbors would come to call "Hippie Town." Kaufman's utopia fell apart, as such places tend to do, under the usual pressures, but he stayed in the woods, eventually losing his academic job but finding plenty of other work to do as a sometime builder and land appraiser. His tales of how to go about making a home in the backcountry may give would-be back-to-the-landers pause, but they're certainly instructive and full of useful details. (Who knew that "the average small house requires over 50,000 nails," or that a builder hammering by hand would need to devote nearly two weeks to driving those nails in?) Kaufman is a keen observer of the ways of nature, discussing the natural history of trees, the habits of flying squirrels and copperheads, and the relentless cycle of life and death. An evident conservationist, he also finds room for extractive activities such as logging, mining, and hunting, and he argues for individual ownership of the land, maintaining that "the world's greatest environmental tragedies are largely on public lands or lands to which no one has a secure title or protection for a claim."
At times Kaufman falls into cantankerousness, grumbling at urban environmentalists who, he holds, unduly romanticize life in the wilds--"No one," he writes, "lives happily ever after alone in a wild place"--and taking potshots at the likes of Henry David Thoreau, who lived in his famed woodland cabin for only a fraction of the time that Kaufman lived in his. These ill-tempered lapses, which read like afterthoughts meant to attract controversy, don't detract too badly from the rest of Kaufman's generally easygoing memoir, which, all in all, is a worthy addition to the library devoted to country life. --Gregory McNamee
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
A pioneer of the back-to-the-land movement, Kaufman established Saralyn, an ecologically minded community, on 330 acres of North Carolina woodlands in 1968. Some 35 familiesAowner-builders who created their own homesAattempted to live the simple life in what locals dubbed "Hippie Town." The colony's diverse residents have included "three Irish bricklaying brothers," a Zen monk, a saxophone-playing dentist, a Quaker stone mason and a retired lieutenant-colonel who built a Japanese solar house. In this gracefully written, leisurely memoir, Kaufman wages a running argument with his former guiding light, Thoreau. Whereas Thoreau, convinced that wilderness could save civilization, advocated voluntary simplicity and voluntary poverty, KaufmanAby dint of hard experience pursuing a frugal, back-to-nature lifestyleAcomes to the opposite conclusion: that managing land and natural resources is built into human behavior. Embracing technology as necessity, he notes that "to live as [Thoreau] did is to live in malnutrition, in violation of the law, and in generally substandard conditions." In 1974, Kaufman designed and built his own house in a forest half a mile from Saralyn. Among his welcome if uninvited house guests are fearless Carolina wrens, flying squirrels living in the attic, snakes and bees in an observation-box in the living-room wall. A vegetarian and organic gardener, Kaufman doesn't condemn hunting, and his critique of what he sees as the romantic fallacies of environmentalists and back-to-the-land enthusiasts undergirds this iconoclastic meditation on our place in nature and on the kinship between humankind and animals. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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