Jeanne Darst recounts a life filled with wrong choices, poor decisions, and a general lack of interest from her alcoholic parents and her apathetic sisters. As might be expected, this is not a happy story, but it has it’s occasional funny bits. I can’t think of any at the moment, but I did smile once or twice. Fiction Ruined My Family is not really about Jeanne Darst, it’s more about her father and his quest to write the ultimate tell all book about Zelda and Scot Fitzgerald. By the time I finished this collection of personal horror stories I found that…
Tag: horror stories
My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm
For a writing assignment, Manny Howard turns his Brooklyn backyard into a small farm with plans to live off the harvest for one month-he recounts his experiences in the book My Empire of Dirt. This path is not a smooth and easy one, though our hero seems to think it will be as he sets out. Along the way Manny Howard comes up with a wide array of odd and often very optimistic ideas about what farming is and how best to raise chickens, rabbits, fish, ducks, and a large number of plants. Like all new gardeners he discovers that…
Made by Hand-Is This How Tom Good Would Do It?
There’s something fun about the idea of a gazillionaire taking up the DIY craze by doing such things as organic gardening and making his own cigar box banjos. He explores the many benefits of knowing how to build things, modify things, and create things out of the odds and ends most people toss out for the trash collector. It’s clear from the introduction that boingboing founder Mark Frauenfelder never read The Sex Life of Cannibals, a wonderful book about what a living hell the islands along the equator are. Mark and his wife decide to move with their two small…