The Plain Reader: Essays on Making a Simple Life

From Scott Savage, editor of the Luddite, Quaker, and Amish magazine The Plain Reader, comes an illuminating anthology of the same name. In essays sure to enlighten and inspire even the most urban and technologically-reliant readers, the writers collected here offer a window into a pared-down life, as they search for (and find) a sense of home, intimacy, and community through the act of simplification. Discussing everything from creating a community through shared labor on a farm to reconnecting with children through home schooling and the purging of radios and televisions to using midwives in place of obstetricians and medical technology, these essays offer alternatives to corporate and electronic America, while resisting the urge to proselytize. Written with heart, thought, and good intention, The Plain Reader may very well be the late 20th century's multi-voiced answer to Henry David Thoreau's Walden. --Kera Bolonik