The Way Home
Tales from a life without technology
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
An honest, radical and moving account of life off the grid.
It was 11pm when I checked my email for the last time and turned off my phone for what I hoped would be forever.
No running water, no car, no electricity or any of the things it powers: the internet, phone, washing machine, radio or light bulb. Just a wooden cabin, on a smallholding, by the edge of a stand of spruce.
In this upfront and lyrical account of a remarkable life without modern technology, Mark Boyle explores the hard won joys of building a home with his bare hands, learning to make fire, collecting water from the spring, foraging and fishing.
What he finds is an elemental life, one governed by the rhythms of the sun and seasons, where life and death dance in a primal landscape of blood, wood, muck, water, and fire – much the same life we have lived for most of our time on earth. Revisiting it brings a deep insight into what it means to be human at a time when the boundaries between man and machine are blurring.
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‘Boyle's memoir of his first year off-grid is fascinating… A poetic meditation on the almost-mystical benefits of falling in sync with nature.’ —New Statesman
‘A warts-and-all look at an extreme way of life, but one that, by the end of this engrossing book, makes the world around it seem dysfunctional.’ —Irish Independent, BOOK OF THE YEAR 2019
‘A beautiful and thought-provoking story that will inspire you to live differently. Mark asks the most fundamental questions then sets out to live the answers.’ Lily Cole, model and activist
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A man forsakes modern gadgetry for labor and the land in this knotty saga of radical sustainability. Pivoting from the project of surviving without monetary exchanges that he recounted in his previous book The Moneyless Man, Boyle built a cabin on an Irish farm and vowed to live without computers, electricity, phones, plumbing, fossil-fueled heating, clocks, or any other "industrial-scale, complex technology" that "showed no respect for life." He duly spends the book hewing wood, drawing water, growing vegetables, collecting manure, fishing for dinner, and writing diaristic vignettes by pencil and candlelight. Boyle's haphazard technophobia and critique of "the mechanizing, homogenizing, industrializing, killing culture" of high-tech society are vehement but incoherent: he forbids himself matches but allows himself bicycles, steel tools, and hitchhiked rides, and never explains why a lower-tech world would be environmentally benign. More convincing is his Thoreauvian homage "I wanted to put my finger on the pulse of life," he writes, "feel cold and hunger and fear" and "lick the bare bones of existence clean" to rustic authenticity; he writes vividly of Ireland's village culture, with its neighborly sharing and cozy pubs, and of the satisfactions of hard work with tangible results. Boyle's case against technology is thin, but his elegy for rural life is lovely.
Customer Reviews
Inspiring
Great read that makes you second guess all that you think about life and your place in it.