Category: Reviews

In 2010, when Kristin Kimball’s “The Dirty Life” came out, I was at the beginning of my farming life. With two summers of field work and dreams of owning my own farm taking root inside me, her memoir of falling in love with the land and her husband propelled me on my own journey. “Good

Everyone needs more than one book on herbal medicine. Some books focus on how to grow each plant and the healing properties they offer or how to make medicine in many forms; some delve into the deep science and teach exact ratios. Each approach broadens our knowledge and builds our resources. I thought owning books

For anyone who has taken more than a cursory look at the industrialized system that feeds much of the world, there is plenty to be concerned about. Chris Smaje, a social scientist turned farmer turned food activist, is one of those people. For the last 20 years he has been peering deeply into the food

Ah, chickens: the gateway drug to many a barnyard menagerie. Simple to tend with generous returns, their appeal extends beyond rural farmyards, reaching up to urban rooftops and across suburban backyards. These days more people know about chickens than don’t, and with so many of us having already fallen for these feathered friends, upon seeing

“What kind of nourishment prepares us for bravery?” Severine von Tscharner Fleming asks in her introduction to “The New Farmer’s Almanac, Volume V.” As we emerge into summer after a year of COVID-19 lockdowns, social justice uprisings, wildfires and floods, we need to be brave enough to map a new way of being. One that

Long before wild blueberries came into popular discourse as a nutrient-dense “superfood,” Indigenous people of the Northeast were benefiting from their taste, nutrition and cultural significance. “The blueberry represents a very important source of food. It was really important when all other resources were gone,” says Donald Soctomah, historic preservation officer for the Passamaquoddy Tribe.

“The Monsanto Papers: Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption, and One Man’s Search for Justice” by investigative journalist Carey Gillam covers the 2018 jury trial of Dewayne Johnson v. Monsanto Company. The plaintiff, known to friends and family as Lee, alleged to have developed a rare type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma as a direct result of using Monsanto’s