You Can Go Home Again: Adventures of a Contrary Life

by Gene Logsdon

Book Overview

"This is an enjoyable book that, for a brief while, will take many of its readers home." --News-Journal (Mansfield, OH)

" Logsdon] offers warmth and insight . . The simpler life is within our reach--if we will choose it." --Booklist

"This is a quiet, reflective work that describes in some detail the difficulty of developing and maintaining a lifestyle supported by the land, something easier planned than maintained. . . . a memoir of the spiritual path of one escapee." --Bloomsbury Review

"Deliciously irreverent, endearingly self-deprecating, full of good humor, Gene Logsdon's latest work is his personal testament to home, the retaining of which has been (Carol aside) the passion of his life." --Ohio Ecological Food & Arm Association News

"Gene Logsdon has lived by failing according to most people's standards of success, and has made a good life. A good book, too. I like You Can Go Home Again (to name one reason of several) because it comes from experience. It has to do, not with speculation or theory or wishful thinking, but with what is possible." --Wendell Berry

"Gene Logsdon demonstrates once again that a combination of intelligence, scholarship, passion, and fervent patriotism can equal only one characteristic these days, a contrary mind of a high order." --Wes Jackson, The Land Institute

"In this vigorous memoir of his search for the good life, Gene Logsdon tells us why America's agrarian values matter to our future as well as to our past. Living simply, respecting the land, taking pleasure from the work of our hands, supplying many of our own needs, acting as neighbors--those values have not been lost, they've only been displaced, shoved to the margins. And Logsdon shows how we might draw them back to the center of our lives." --Scott Russell Sanders

Here is a book for everyone who has dreamed about going back to the land to live a simpler more meaningful life. Gene Logsdon's story embodies both the frustrations and longing so many of us feel as we search for our essential selves and a happy harmonious economic existence. The measure of his courage--and contrariness--is that he has been successful. In You Can Go Home Again, he tells us what motivated him and what success has meant.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0253334195
• ISBN13: 9780253334190
• Release Date: October 1998
• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.92 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.9" x 8.7"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

We're doing it -- Coming home

I *am* going home again. After nearly 20 years in Texas, my family is moving back to Ohio. We feel that call that Gene Logsdon describes so movingly, hilariously. Now, most people, considering the fact that we are doing it by going first and finding jobs later, think we are certifiable. How wonderful to read Gene's work and find encouragement in values that go beyond acquisition and comfort. We're college [over]educated and employable, and jobs are the least of our worries. Gene's book talks about home, care, a sense of place. When a place where eleven generations have called home calls you back, you have to listen, and that's why we're going. We have a "10-year plan" -- we're lucky enough to be starting out on some acreage on my Dad's farm. And will build from there. My child and my brother's children will be able to cross the pasture to visit each other and their grandparents. Will we be self-sufficient? Of course not. What does that mean anyway? People are too "self-sufficient" as it is. I want to live someplace where I can depend on people (in all the right senses of the word). We'll grow some vegetables and berries, raise some chickens and have a good time doing it. I dream grandiosely of a cow or maybe three goats (I want to name them Gina, Lola and Brigitta, but my husband is pushing for "Shot Clock I, II, & III" [he spends a lot of time statting basketball games!]) I pour over Lehman's catalogues. It's fun to plan.I think that's where reviewer "trailboss" below misses Gene's point. I've read everything of Gene's that I can lay my hands on (too much is out of print! ), and one point he repeatedly emphasizes is that this is not about subsistence farming. There's more than "survival" to it or it wouldn't be worth last week's supermarket strawberries.Gene never claims that you can find Total Peace, Contentment and Happiness and on a homestead. If you don't have some of that before you start, then disappointment is inevitable.Going home is about place, people, and good dirt. That's the saving grace of it. Not making a "profit" on it, not becoming Organically Pure, or worshipping Gaia. Of course, you can do all those things, but the home and the dirt is the start of it.And the softball. Former high school first-base ace here! Since we're moving to southern Richland County, Ohio, I hope we get to meet Gene and the boys in a softball tournament somewhere, sometime! In the meantime, Gene, keep pestering your publishers about reprints. :)

Uncommonly gutsy and intimate

I just finished the book.Reading the other reviews, one gets the feeling that they were reading different books. It reminds me of the Indian folktale of the four blind men and the elephant. Actually, I like the Persian version better: where three men encounter the elephant on a very dark night. The fourth man brings a candle. Ultimately, the Persian story is a story of redemption and salvation. And so is You Can Go Home.This book is likely to cause discomfort to those have a very high need for order. Sometimes we (the Hecksel's) have guests on short notice. When that happens, we make the house suitable for company by taking all the clutter-of-life and pitching it into one of the bedrooms...the one with the lock, of course. Gene's book is a personal guided tour of that room. Great fun for those who love stories and antiques. Pain for those who crave a completely deterministic approach to life.Gene is gutsy because he talks about religion. Gene is doubly gutsy for talking about money. Americans are funny people. We will tell total strangers of our sexual conquests before ordering our second drink, but not tell our CPA the true extent of our wealth & earnings. Go figure.We are rich in proportion to what we do not need.

Tears & belly-laughs mixed with delight and insight!!

Trust your instincts - - this is the message that keeps returning in this story of one man's life filled with choices that would cause uncertainty for anyone. Gene's self-effacing narrative describes how uncertain life can be when faced with tough choices.These were very tough choices: Move from small-town USA to Metropolitan sprawl? Withdraw from something as precious as the priesthood? Steal some fresh-baked pies and risk the wrath of nuns?Somehow it is comforting to know that life can have an "undo" button. Gene illustrates that you can make a wrong choice and still recover. The message: You should always trust your instincts, and you can go home again.This is a wonderful, if brief, story of someone who bares his life and soul, so that others can see the common thread - - be true to yourself.

Excellent reading for all who are "homesick".

Mr. Logsdon goes a wonderful job of describing how it feels to "go home again" and why so many of us yearn for what we think is impossible. His stories and accounts of life at home are told in a warm and personal way; a way that touched and stirred my soul.