Twenty Acres

<p><b>A memoir infused with both empathy and inquiry.</b></p> <p><b>-Wendy J. Fox <i>Electric Literature</i></b><br> <br> <i>Twenty Acres</i> is an engaging thoughtful memoir of growing up in an off-the-grid cabin as part of the 1970s back-to-the-land movement. Sarah Neidhardt captures her subject beautifully and offers a compelling portrait of a highly specific historically significant time and place.<br> -Kate Daloz author of <i>We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America</i><br> <br> Sarah Neidhardt grew up in the woods. When she was an infant her parents left behind comfortable urbane lives to take part in the back-to-the-land movement. They moved their young family to an isolated piece of land deep in the Arkansas Ozarks where they built a cabin grew crops and strove for eight years to live self-sufficiently.<br>  <br> In this vivid memoir Neidhardt explores her childhood in wider familial and social contexts. Drawing upon a trove of family letters and other archival material she follows her parents' journey from privilege to food stamps-from their formative youths to their embrace of pioneer homemaking and rural poverty to their sudden and wrenching return to conventional society-and explores the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s as it was and as she lived it.<br>  <br> A story of strangers in a strange land of class marriage and family in a changing world <i>Twenty Acres: A Seventies Childhood in the Woods</i> is part childhood idyll part cautionary tale. Sarah Neidhardt reveals the treasures and tolls of unconventional pastoral lives and her insightful reflections offer a fresh perspective on what it means to aspire to pre-industrial lifestyles in a modern world.</p>