Saved
How I quit worrying about money and became the richest guy in the world
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
When Ben Hewitt met Erik Gillard, he was amazed. Here was a real-life rebel living happily and comfortably in small-town Vermont on less than $10,000 per year. Gillard's no bum. He has a job, a girlfriend, good friends, and strong ties to the community. But how he lives his life—and why—launches Hewitt on a quest to understand the true role of money and mindless consumerism in our lives. By meeting and befriending people like Erik Gillard, Hewitt realized that their happiness was real. What was he—and the rest of a deeply unhappy population—missing?
Saved is the humorous, surprising, and ultimately life-changing result of Hewitt's quest, a narrative that challenges everything we know about the meaning of money. Hewitt uses his sharp eye for story, exhaustive reporting, and his own experience living below his means to bring what he learned into an even larger context. How does money really work? How can a bankrupt society move forward? The answers are not what you think, and Hewitt has written an important book for our times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hewitt expands on previous writing about food (Making Supper Safe: One Man's Quest to Learn the Truth About Food Safety) to provide sustenance for the mind and soul in this energetic and challenging examination of how we live and what we live for. A self-employed writer in northern Vermont, Hewitt comes to see his self-reliant friend Erik Gillard as a foil to the destructive pursuit of monetary, hence illusory, riches. Crisp, vivid descriptions of the two mushroom gathering, visiting an old sugarhouse, and building cabin steps display the practical skills that Hewitt endorses, and evoke Thoreau's precise depictions of nature. Despite his doubts and misgivings, for Hewitt the ultimate significance of the individual example is to blaze a trail to communal changes. However the reader chooses to regard Hewitt's acquired insights, his presentation of a conscious alternative to the life of quiet desperation is inspiring.
