Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology

I'm not sure how this book is so split between excellent reviews and poor ones. The negative reviews often describe the author as arrogant and narcissistic; he's certainly introspective, as is appropriate in a memoir (I wonder what these same reviewers would say about Thoreau), but I don't see the arrogance. The author doesn't shy away from negative depictions of himself. Compared to his new Amish-style neighbors, he's weak, ignorant, and incompetent in his new lifestyle, but he seems to realize this.He doesn't say explicitly, “I was an idiot”, or “I'm full of regret about that.” One wonders whether the other reviewers are products of a laugh-track culture that can't figure out for themselves what's supposed to be funny or self-deprecating. For example, one tongue-in-cheek remark occurred when the author and his wife were having their first child and they went to a local store to buy baby supplies. The cash register rang up over $100, a large sum in their circumstances. He says, “Mary [his wife] looked at me. I looked at Mary. Didn't she know that the baby items were the mother's responsibility? ‘Can't you use your credit card?' I asked.” Do these reviewers actually think that he made his wife put it on their credit card, because it's the “mother's responsibility”? If that were really the case, he wouldn't think it was worth talking about. It's a joke, people, about them not having money. Perhaps a poor joke, but I'd hate to live in a world where every joke has to be explained in great detail, lest it offend.That said, I would have liked to hear more of Mary's perspective, of what it like being a woman in Amish country. The author does seem oddly incurious about this, as well as silent on what had originally attracted him to Mary. I can't help but compare this book to another experimental memoir which I really enjoyed, [b: The Dirty Life 7841677 The Dirty Life On Farming, Food, and Love Kristin Kimball https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1277929135s/7841677.jpg 10935145], in which a journalist from New York City marries a relatively new farmer and they start a CSA farm together from scratch. There, the romance between the two and their joint efforts on the farm get much more emotional attention, and poetic nature of that book seems more fitting. Still, there were some really interesting points made about the roles of men and women. Brende said at one point, “The word house-husband is redundant. Of course! This startling thought came to me as I reached for the hand pump. The ‘hus-‘ from ‘husband' is simply the Old English form of the word ‘house,' while ‘band' means ‘bound.' The man who stays at home to work is returning to a long-forgotten calling preserved in the language like a fossil. There is no linguistic need to add the extra ‘house.' “All in all, it's definitely worth reading, but I would suggest reading [b: The Dirty Life 7841677 The Dirty Life On Farming, Food, and Love Kristin Kimball https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1277929135s/7841677.jpg 10935145] and [b: The Unsettling of America 146191 The Unsettling of America Culture and Agriculture Wendell Berry https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1363657372s/146191.jpg 1984458] before this one.

Overall a good book but the author comes across to be a bit of an evangelical fundamentalist with his anti-technology views. Perhaps I'm overly sensitive to that, though, having had similar feelings and broadcast them on my blog back when we lived in a yurt with no electricity or running water for 2 years. Ten years after that, living then in a highrise in Canada's biggest city I realized that it was pretty narrow-minded of me to be so sure that living that simply was not only right for me but the way everyone should be living. It was right for our family then, and a different way of life is right for us now.

The author seems to fall into the same trap I did - feeling that the fact that the life change he made then and that worked so well for him then was the life change that everyone else needs to make, and that many of society's ills are caused by the failure of everyone to do so.