This Life Is in Your Hands

January 10, 2011
With urban farming and backyard chicken flocks becoming increasingly popular, Coleman has written this timely and honest portrait of her own childhood experience in Maine with her two homesteading parents during the turbulent 1970s. Inspired by the back-to-the-land lifestyle of Scott and Helen Nearing, Coleman's parents, Sue and Eliot, decided to create their own idyllic reality on 60 acres of land in Maine that was sold to them by the Nearing family for a token sum. While Coleman emphasizes the beauty of growing up in a family culture that valued the bounty of nature and freedom of expression, she does not hesitate to also expose farming's detrimental effect on family life—her own well-being as well as the accidental death of her younger sister.

January 15, 2011

An earnest memoirist remembers her family and their hardscrabble organic-farm life in Maine

During the enthusiasm of the 1960s, Coleman's parents chose to live as self-sufficient a life as possible, becoming evangelists of healthy, all-natural living. The family's farm was coaxed into fecundity with the efforts of a number of virile acolytes, who, when they were not tending the vegetable stand, enjoyed the natural unclothed life. Coleman's mother had babies, baked bread, did chores and kept a journal while her father supervised, spread manure and pronounced wise and generally trite aphorisms. Figuring largely in the tale were their neighbors and spiritual guides, Helen and Scott Nearing, the redoubtable counterculture back-to-the-landers. Learning from the Nearings, Coleman's father taught others the correct, macrobiotic lifestyle. The family's tenuous subsistence amid the roots and rocks was nourishing and rewarding, until the shocking drowning death of the author's 3-year-old sister, a heartbreaking event that led to the slow disintegration of the family. In this elegiac memory piece, the author describes her bucolic girlhood in languid, deliberately measured prose, and investigates the downward spiral that followed her sister's death.

A verdant memory of a different American childhood and of an idyll that ended tragically.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

March 15, 2011
With parents who were devoted acolytes of original back-to-the-landers Helen and Scott Nearing, Coleman grew up in the early 1970s as the quintessential hippie baby, eating organic foods, running barefoot and free on 60 acres of Maines back woods. As her fathers enthusiasm for self-sufficiency took on a zealots verve, Colemans mother shouldered more of the arduous domestic duties, resolutely tending the familys spartan cabin sans running water or electricity. Known for devotion to the cause, the charismatic young couple soon attracted followers, and when a second child, Heidi, was born, it seemed as though, perhaps, they really could lead a charmed existence. It lasted two years, until the day Heidi drowned in the propertys pond. The death of a child has the potential to destroy any family, and Colemans was no exception. With her parents divorce, Coleman experienced a surging sense of abandonment, one that she attempts to reconcile in this poignant memoir that chronicles the nascent homesteading counterculture in paralyzing detail.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)