Coop A Year of Poultry Pigs and Parenting (Audible Audio Edition) Michael Perry Audible Studios Books
Download As PDF : Coop A Year of Poultry Pigs and Parenting (Audible Audio Edition) Michael Perry Audible Studios Books
In over his head with two pigs, a dozen chickens, and a baby due any minute, the acclaimed author of Truck A Love Story gives us a humorous, heartfelt memoir of a new life in the country.
Last seen sleeping off his wedding night in the back of a 1951 International Harvester pickup, Michael Perry is now living in a rickety Wisconsin farmhouse. Faced with 37 acres of fallen fences and overgrown fields, and informed by his pregnant wife that she intends to deliver their baby at home, Perry plumbs his unorthodox childhood - his city-bred parents took in more than 100 foster children while running a ramshackle dairy farm - for clues to how to proceed as a farmer, a husband, and a father.
And when his daughter Amy starts asking about God, Perry is called upon to answer questions for which he's not quite prepared. He muses on his upbringing in an obscure fundamentalist Christian sect and weighs the long-lost faith of his childhood against the skeptical alternative ("You cannot toss your seven-year-old a copy of Being and Nothingness").
Whether Perry is recalling his childhood ("I first perceived my father as a farmer the night he drove home with a giant lactating Holstein tethered to the bumper of his Ford Falcon") or what it's like to be bitten in the butt while wrestling a pig ("two firsts in one day"), Coop is filled with the humor his readers have come to expect. But Perry also writes from the quieter corners of his heart, chronicling experiences as joyful as the birth of his child and as devastating as the death of a dear friend.
Alternately hilarious, tender, and as real as pigs in mud, Coop is suffused with a contemporary desire to reconnect with the Earth, with neighbors, with meaning...and with chickens.
Coop A Year of Poultry Pigs and Parenting (Audible Audio Edition) Michael Perry Audible Studios Books
Beautiful, evocative, slightly lyrical writing from Michael Perry about spending a year getting his very own family farm up and running while his capable and pragmatic wife goes through pregnancy, birth, and the early stages of raising their newborn daughter. Along for the ride is his wife's six-year-old from a previous relationship, and Michael speaks movingly of the way he lucked into being her stepfather. She's a spitfire, the kind of kid fascinated by the reality of taking piglets and turning them into bacon and meat after they're grown. He also writes about living life as a writer who also sometimes has to take on odd jobs to make ends meet. Michael Perry is a wonderful writer - I pick up one of his books whenever I'm feeling particularly homesick for my Midwestern childhood. It's like going into your small town's local diner and finding a guy in a tattered old Central IL Ag baseball cap sitting at the counter nursing a coffee, who you end up spending three hours talking about everything under the sun with and you're never even the slightest bit bored.He's a wonderful poetric writer, and I love his work.
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Coop A Year of Poultry Pigs and Parenting (Audible Audio Edition) Michael Perry Audible Studios Books Reviews
Having spent my life just across the river in rural mn, your experiences closely resemble our life. I really admire the talent to write about such mundane things and make it interesting. I think I married the twin to Mills. Piles of stuff everywhere! We are better stocked than most hardware stores if you can only find it. Having such total recall of the minute memories of childhood I had forgotten about. Total laugh out loud stories and others to bring you to tears. A must read if you are contemplating the simple life. Thank you!
I loved this book maybe because I lived on a farm for a long time and I could relate. But it was great. A different style of writing but easy to get into the rhythm. I love how he professes his love for his family, especially the way he teaches his little girl things about life that most children wouldn't be ready for. But farm children are different and learn more about life at an early age. I'll probably read it again and I never do that!
I read a library copy of this book years ago and it was a memorable experience. I've regaled my friends and family with some of his stories and (for a wonder) I find that I remembered them correctly. But there's a lot in this book that I don't remember. Did I forget parts or could his first version of this book been a slimmer one?
I can see that this book would appeal to a lot of people for different reasons. The idea of "living on the land" is appealing, although the reality wouldn't suit most of us. And, as the author would be the first to tell you, his farm doesn't really support his family at this stage. Still, his stories of pigs and chickens and the ingenuity of his farming friends and neighbors are delightfully entertaining.
And then there's the fact that he writes so well and comes across as a genuinely nice guy - the kind of man you'd like to have a drink with or work with on a PTA committee or see jumping out of an ambulance if you were injured or ill. He's not perfect. No married man is perfect, as his wife will be quick to tell you, but he tries and he means well. He's always ready to laugh at myself, which makes him hard to resist.
But to me the greatest value of Perry's books lies in the insights into his family. I love the story of his mother's deep commitment to a small, little-known Christian denomination and how it shaped their family life. His father was an engineer and married into the church, but became as devoted to it as his wife. Was it their religious beliefs or simply a need to help others that led them to foster so many special-needs children?
Sometimes the children of parents who take in "strays" are resentful of the time, attention, and money that are diverted to the new kids. The author doesn't seem to have felt that way and it would be interesting to know if all of his siblings were as tolerant or if he's just easy-going by nature.
The story of his relationship with his step-daughter (his "given daughter" as he calls her) is tender and encouraging. All of us have seen so much damage from divorce. If one family can push past the anger and form bonds that give a child security and respect for others, maybe there's hope for the rest of us.
It's not unusual to find a book that's a collection of well-written, entertaining anecdotes. This book is more than that and that's why it stuck in my mind.
If you're a fan of Michael Perry's writing- a group I count myself as a member of- you'll find this book as funny and as touching as any of his others. Perry (for those who have yet to discover him) is a writer, musician, monologist, RN, and emergency responder who uses all these talents to eke out a modest living with his wife and daughters on a small farm near a small town in Wisconsin where he grew up. Perry's books are a series of personal histories recounting his youth, his family's history, and in the case of this volume, his attempts at trying to recreate the kind of modest farm life that he grew up in, all the while dealing with recalcitrant animals, a new family, home birth, and his self-described semi-competence at the kinds of skills needed to accomplish all that. Luckily for Perry he has a great number of relatives, friends, and neighbors, all of whom are both ready and willing to help.
Perry has the ability to be humorous without resorting to jokes and one-liners, and to be touching without ever becoming maudlin. His stories take the reader back and forth between his contemporary efforts and his life growing up on a small farm with dozens of biological, adopted, and temporary siblings, and the way he tells it, none of these experiences are or were particularly exceptional; it's just the way his life was, and is. He appreciates all of it, and manages to find the humor as well as the joy in every moment.
Beautiful, evocative, slightly lyrical writing from Michael Perry about spending a year getting his very own family farm up and running while his capable and pragmatic wife goes through pregnancy, birth, and the early stages of raising their newborn daughter. Along for the ride is his wife's six-year-old from a previous relationship, and Michael speaks movingly of the way he lucked into being her stepfather. She's a spitfire, the kind of kid fascinated by the reality of taking piglets and turning them into bacon and meat after they're grown. He also writes about living life as a writer who also sometimes has to take on odd jobs to make ends meet. Michael Perry is a wonderful writer - I pick up one of his books whenever I'm feeling particularly homesick for my Midwestern childhood. It's like going into your small town's local diner and finding a guy in a tattered old Central IL Ag baseball cap sitting at the counter nursing a coffee, who you end up spending three hours talking about everything under the sun with and you're never even the slightest bit bored.
He's a wonderful poetric writer, and I love his work.
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