How Simple Is Life: A Naturalist's Memoir of Lessons Learned

When the back-to-the-land movement burst in on rural Chatham County, North Carolina in the 1960s it shocked, scandalized, galvanized and irrevocably changed the world of red clay farms, tobacco lands, segregation, and ‘yellow dog Democrats.’ In How Simple Is Life Wallace Kaufman tells how he became “the mayor of Hippie Town,“ built his own small home deep in the forest, almost blew himself up, broke his back, and began to read lessons in the land around him like a book.He and his daughter learn surprising lessons not only about nature but about people whose hopes, like his own, blossomed in those woods, then died. If Henry David Thoreau had marched to his different drummer in the woods of North Carolina instead of at Walden Pond 170 years ago , and if he had gone to live in the woods for 25 years instead of two, instead of becoming the posthumous champion of the "simple life," he might have asked, "How simple is life?"Wallace Kaufman’s report of life in and around his forest brings you not only sharp, original and unsentimental insights into the wild world, but a cast of characters from the dim past to the high tech present who will forever enrich your sense of time and place. Read more