Twenty Acres: A Seventies Childhood in the Woods

"Sarah Neidhardt grew up in the backwoods. She was an infant when her parents joined the back-to-the-land movement, uprooting their young family to move to an isolated piece of land deep in the Arkansas Ozarks, where they built a cabin, grew crops, and for years strove to achieve an ideal of agrarian self-sufficiency. In Twenty Acres: A Seventies Childhood in the Woods, Neidhardt revisits her childhood with compassion and candor. She retraces her parents' journey--from their affluent youth, to their embrace of pioneer homemaking and rural poverty, to their sudden and wrenching return to conventional society--using a trove of family letters and archival research. As she comes to better understand her family and the movement that shaped them, Neidhardt reveals both the treasures and tolls of their unconventional lives and offers a fresh perspective on what it means to aspire to a preindustrial life in the modern world"--