Book Review: This Life Is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone
By Melissa Coleman
I read pieces of this book during my lucid periods last week and wanted to write a quick review. This is a MUST READ book for anyone who has ever dreamed about chunking it all in and moving to that little cabin in the woods. It’s not because the book is full of tips, tricks, and advice on organic gardening or living a simple life. It’s because it contains many scenes showing the opposite. It shows you the hard work and long-term problems that might come from trying to replicate an idealized lifestyle that may not for everyone as well as the good times. This is something that most books simply do not. The author seems to not remember many of the bad times (or the editors edit them out). This book includes those problems.
The book is written by the daughter of organic gardening guru, Eliot Coleman. I have read all of Eliot’s works over the years, as well as his muses – Helen and Scott Nearing, and have loved them all. This book takes you behind the scenes of the early years of Eliot’s career in organic gardening and will give you the good and bad. Yes there are scenes in the book which I would have loved to have shared with my daughters and grandchildren. There are other scenes which will make you wonder if it would all have been worth it. Granted, the bad times might have been caused mostly by Eliot’s myopic views on how they should live their lives, but that is something that is hard to get from only one person’s story. Not to give much away, but you see the early struggles of someone who would eventually be an internationally recognized expert. Like all people who eventually rise the top of their field, something had to give along the way. Melissa’s book walks the reader through what had to give during those years.
Hopefully, the long-term issues were caused by Eliot’s views and long hours can served as a warning to others and not because you simply can’t live the lifestyle we have come to idealize. You simply cannot start from scratch with no money, not time, no help, and no clue and build up a self-sufficient lifestyle overnight. If you try to do so, your family will pay the price. For those of us who would like to keep all, or at least a portion, of our family intact as we simplify our lives, take the warnings this book gives you and learn from them. What may look like the ideal lifestyle from the outside will have its own dark side.
Read the book and learn from it. Don’t think you can just chuck it all aside and trek into the wilderness and start over with problems. Yes, there will be days of sunshine and lilies, but there will also be many days of rain, mud, blood, and manure. You just have to hope the good days outnumber the bad by a large margin.
So, ready to read this book after reading my review which is all over the place? I had a hard time writing this book because I both loved and hated the book. Too much darkness, but also great times mixed in. I’m glad it looks like everything worked out in the long run for Melissa’s family and she is able to overcome whatever emotional issues she may have had early in her life to give us this personal view into her early life. I enjoy this so much more than books that treat lifestyles most of us would like to live with a perfect, Martha Stewart, everything is great perspective and never talk about that baby goat that you spent all week with giving up the ghost ten days later.
Read the book! Remember that every life has good and bad moments and not many books talk about that poor person who is spending twenty hours a day, up to their knees in manure so that the main garden can look like something on a magazine cover.
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