Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
5/5
Audiobook8 hours
The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love
Written by Kristin Kimball
Narrated by Kristin Kimball
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
()
About this audiobook
From a “graceful, luminous writer with an eye for detail” (Minneapolis Star Tribune), this riveting memoir explores a year on a sustainable farm.
When Kristin Kimball left New York City to interview a dynamic young farmer named Mark, her world changed. On an impulse, she shed her city self and started a new farm with him on five hundred acres near Lake Champlain. The Dirty Life is the captivating chronicle of the couple’s first year on Essex Farm, from the cold North Country winter through their harvest-season wedding in the loft of the barn.
Kristin and Mark’s plan to grow everything needed to feed a community was an ambitious idea, and a bit romantic. It worked. Every Friday evening, all year round, over a hundred people travel to Essex Farm to pick up their weekly share of the “whole diet”—beef, pork, chicken, milk, eggs, maple syrup, grains, flours, dried beans, herbs, fruits, and forty different vegetables—produced by the farm. In The Dirty Life, Kristin discovers the wrenching pleasures of physical work, learns that good food is at the center of a good life, falls deeply in love, and finally finds the engagement and commitment she craved in the form of a man, a small town, and a beautiful piece of land.
When Kristin Kimball left New York City to interview a dynamic young farmer named Mark, her world changed. On an impulse, she shed her city self and started a new farm with him on five hundred acres near Lake Champlain. The Dirty Life is the captivating chronicle of the couple’s first year on Essex Farm, from the cold North Country winter through their harvest-season wedding in the loft of the barn.
Kristin and Mark’s plan to grow everything needed to feed a community was an ambitious idea, and a bit romantic. It worked. Every Friday evening, all year round, over a hundred people travel to Essex Farm to pick up their weekly share of the “whole diet”—beef, pork, chicken, milk, eggs, maple syrup, grains, flours, dried beans, herbs, fruits, and forty different vegetables—produced by the farm. In The Dirty Life, Kristin discovers the wrenching pleasures of physical work, learns that good food is at the center of a good life, falls deeply in love, and finally finds the engagement and commitment she craved in the form of a man, a small town, and a beautiful piece of land.
Author
Kristin Kimball
Kristin Kimball is a farmer and a writer living in northern New York. Prior to farming, Kimball worked as a freelance writer, writing teacher, and as an assistant to a literary agent in New York City. A graduate of Harvard University and the author of The Dirty Life and Good Husbandry, she and her husband Mark have run Essex Farm since 2003, where they live with their two daughters.
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Reviews for The Dirty Life
Rating: 4.72 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
50 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Dirty Life is one of my all time favourite books, it literally changed my life! It is entertaining and educational for both farmers and city folk alike. Check out her new sequel as well. Kristin Kimball has a way of writing about life, love, and vegetables that will make you cry.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A wonderful book and the author’s voice matches her writing voice perfectly.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I liked the clean vocabulary,the content, and the honesty. Thanks
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Courageous, tenacious, perceptive and real. Excellent quiet writing and reading!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I’ve read this twice and loved it both times. We own a small farm and misery loves company. Kimball writes beautifully and her candor is so endearing.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The authors voice is so soothing, I listened while awaiting sleep. But this is one alluring story, full of good writing, romantic details and honesty that leaves you wishing this gal was your neighbor. I love true stories for every reason I give this a five star rating and can't wait to listen to her next book, already out!
3 people found this helpful