This book was given to me by a dear friend recently. She praised it highly, and as she is rather smart and has good taste, I had high expectations. I wasn’t disappointed.  

It’s not really a gardening book, as in a how-to, so much as it’s a gardening memoir. And it’s not even a gardening memoir, so much as it is a book about how to live well. 

Much like My Life in France (about French cuisine and how to live) and The Piano Shop on the Left Bank (about pianos and how to live), this is the story of how Joan Dye Gussow and her husband, the artist Alan Gussow, purchased an impractical house in Congers, New York (a Hudson River town), and created a garden.  

And it’s about how they grew much of the food they ate, and started a community garden as well, and how the old house they tried to rescue needed to be torn down and built again, and how she found herself alone when her husband died a mere two and a half years after their move. But it’s also much more than that–Ms. Gussow is a professor, food policy expert, and an environmentalist, and her enthusiasm for (indeed, her obsession with) gardening is a natural extension of her interests and her beliefs. Gardening is, for her, both a vocation and an avocation, and interspersed with the narrative of her home and garden, you will find recipes, advice, inspiration, and very convincing arguments about the many reasons that eating locally and thinking globally is important for our health, for the planet, and for how best to live our lives.

As I was reading, her words put me in mind of Marion Nestle’s What to Eat, Michael Pollen’s In Defense of Food: an Eater’s Manifesto, and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. But then I looked at the publication dates of each of those books–and This Organic Life came first. Ms. Gussow’s work influenced all of those writers. And she’s still at it…her next book is to be called, according to her website, Starting Over at 81.

BOOK: This Organic Life–Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader

AUTHOR: Joan Dye Gussow

YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 2001

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Book cover, This Organic Life, published by Chelsea Green Publishing