My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard Into a Farm by Manny

Description: My Empire of Dirt by Manny Howard For seven months, Manny Howard--a lifelong urbanite--woke up every morning and ventured into his eight-hundred-square-foot backyard to maintain the first farm in Flatbush, Brooklyn, in generations. His goal was simple: to subsist on what he could produce on this farm, and only this farm, for at least a month. The project came at a time in Mannys life when he most needed it--even if his family, and especially his wife, seemingly did not. But a farmers life, he discovered--after a string of catastrophes, including a tornado, countless animal deaths (natural, accidental, and inflicted), and even a severed finger--is not an easy one. And it can be just as hard on those he shares it with. Mannys James Beard Foundation Award-winning New York magazine cover story--the impetus for this project--began as an assessment of the locavore movement. We now think more about what we eat than ever before, buying organic for our health and local for the environment, often making those decisions into political statements in the process. My Empire of Dirt is a ground-level examination--trenchant, touching, and outrageous--of the cultural reflex to control one of the most elemental aspects of our lives: feeding ourselves. Unlike most foodies with a farm fetish, Manny didnt put on overalls with much of a philosophy in mind, save a healthy dose of skepticism about some of the more doctrinaire tendencies of locavores. He did not set out to grow all of his own food because he thought it was the right thing to do or because he thought the rest of us should do the same. Rather, he did it because he was just crazy enough to want to find out how hard it would actually be to take on a challenge based on a radical interpretation of a trendy (if well-meaning) idea and see if he could rise to the occasion. A chronicle of the experiment that took slow-food to the extreme, My Empire of Dirt tells the story of one mans struggle against environmental, familial, and agricultural chaos, and in the process asks us to consider what it really takes (and what it really means) to produce our own food. Its one thing to know the farmer, it turns out--its another thing entirely to be the farmer. For most of us, farming is about food. For the farmer, and his family, its about work. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography Manny Howard is a veteran of the magazine world, having written and/or edited for New York, The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Esquire, Harpers, Rolling Stone, Gourmet, Food & Wine, Details, Mens Journal, Mens Health, Harpers Bazaar, Elle, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Us Weekly, National Geographic, and Travel & Leisure, among many others. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, two children, and a dwindling number of farm animals. Review "Manny Howard--husband, father, novice farmer--is not the sort of person who does things halfway, and thank goodness for that. Here is the dark, charming, hilarious--and thoroughly original--account of his simple, insane plan to live off the land . . . in Brooklyn. (Crops will be destroyed, tempers will be lost, and a marriage may, or may not, survive.) All of this personal drama is improbably enriched by virtuoso passages on everything from the science of tornadoes to the art of breeding rabbits. What a book!" --Jonathan Mahler, author of "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning""Manny Howards wonderful book is much more than a breezy romp across the line that divides urban from rural life. Yes, it crackles with intelligence and good humor, sparkles with hilarious anecdotes, and is studded with entertaining factoids about the agrarian life that Howard decided, so improbably, to adopt (youll never hear the phrase pecking order in quite the same way again). But at its core this book belongs to a great American tradition that goes back to Thoreau: a lone man with big ideas decides to confront Nature on his own. That the nature in question happens to be in Brooklyn gives this book--which like its author is characterized by an unmistakably New York mix of huge ambition and wry self-deprecation--its unique and ultimately quite touching charm." --Daniel Mendelsohn, author of "The Lost""The night I turned forty Manny Howard, a younger guy from the neighborhood, led me to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge. We even stole the flag. It was about five in the morning; we werent sober. It is a great pleasure to now be able to follow him on this slightly safer--well, safer for me--adventure. What a unique wonder this book is! Like a collaboration between Joseph Mitchell, Moe Howard, and Xavier de Maistre ("A Journey Around My Room"). Informative, grungy, rollicking, hilarious, horrifying, obsessive; most of all, a really great story, lived and written by a writer whose heart is as capacious and teeming as all of Brooklyn." --Francisco Goldman, author of "The Art of Political Murder""With "My Empire of Dirt", Manny Howard has created a new job category, gonzo agriculturalist. The squeamish and the vegan-hearted shall enter at their own risk, for this is no gentle "Farmers Almanac". Its more like war reportage--on one side, angry rabbits, crazed chickens, and a patch of backyard clay so dry it makes concrete seem loamy; on the other, a Brooklyn-raised City Boy, who wont take crop failure for an answer. Howard takes living off the land to an urban extreme that will make people think even harder about where their food comes from. Ultimately, though, as tornadoes come and fig trees nearly go, he discovers a marriage that needs tending to, proving that when it comes to love, at least, you shall definitely reap what you sow." --Robert Sullivan, author of "Rats" and "Cross Country" Review Quote "With My Empire of Dirt , Manny Howard has created a new job category, gonzo agriculturalist. The squeamish and the vegan-hearted shall enter at their own risk, for this is no gentle Farmers Almanac . Its more like war reportage-on one side, angry rabbits, crazed chickens, and a patch of backyard clay so dry it makes concrete seem loamy; on the other, a Brooklyn-raised City Boy, who wont take crop failure for an answer. Howard takes living off the land to an urban extreme that will make people think even harder about where their food comes from. Ultimately, though, as tornadoes come and fig trees nearly go, he discovers a marriage that needs tending to, proving that when it comes to love, at least, you shall definitely reap what you sow." -Robert Sullivan, author of Rats and Cross Country Excerpt from Book PROLOGUE: THE RAFT Fifteen minutes gone that we can never get back and all we are doing is staring through the wrought-iron railings of the Promenade fence out over the East River, two eight-year-olds just stuck inside a day. There are no bullies to run from in the park, no rats to stalk in the undergrowth beyond the playground. Though, its true, we have never, either of us, ever seen a black party balloon before, still we ran out of good stuff to throw at the one stuck in the tree above us almost right away. Our bikes havent turned into police motorcycles yet. This is not an adventure at all. A soot-smeared orange ferry on its way to Staten Island drifts out of its decrepit, oxidizing dock at the Battery. A tugboat with a gravel barge stuck to its nose pushes its way against the current and, ever so slowly, upriver toward, and eventually beyond, the Brooklyn Bridge. We lay limp against the fence, both unable to imagine how we will survive this endlessly dull day ahead, but both too polite to complain to each other. Hey, wait. There it is right in front of us. We arent pressing our faces up against the fence rails anymore; suddenly these are the twisted bars of a great, dark cage, and right there, staring back at us, is Adventure. "Lets build a raft," I breathe, too excited to speak the words. Chriss eyes strain against the side of his skull, trying to see my face, gauge my intention without taking his head away from the sun-warmed metal bars. "A raft out of what?" "Wood," I say, not certain that rafts can be built from anything else. "Where would we go?" my friend asks. "There." I point with my arm fully extended through the bars out across the river, north of the Fulton Fish Market, to the only visible sliver of beach on Manhattan Island. "Where will we get the wood?" asks Chris, quickening to the plan. "Ill show you," I reply, the plan coming together as I gallop the few yards to my bike. It is yellow, has a black banana seat, and best of all it has three speeds. The gear shifter looks just like one in a cool muscle car. Rather than being on the chrome handlebars, its mounted on the crossbar. The selector has a pommel grip you pull toward you as you work through the gears. It shows the gear youre in with a red line next to each number, one, two, three. If I pedal hard enough, I have convinced myself, sparks will shoot out of the pipe at the back just behind my seat where the chrome plastic cap has fallen off and left an exhaust-pipe kind of hole. We mount our bikes and make our way north along the Promenade, fly down Suicide Hill to Old Fulton Street and the abandoned cobbled streets beyond, under the noisy roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge and down New Dock Street, which ends hard against the East River. Beyond the low guardrail that we are scrambling over, the river has long since swept the tar-flecked wooden mooring posts and concrete docking into a chaos of enormous, jutting, broken teeth. It functions as a maw, catching the flotsam of a river at its environmental nadir. Collected here among the filth is everything two eight-year-old boys in search of adventure could ever need to build a raft. The rest of the day and--because Chris is sleeping over and then my mom says it is okay for us to spend the whole day--the next were filled scrambling across the collapsed pier, collecting odd lengths and diameters of rope and faded scraps of plastic--once umbrellas, municipal office-furniture upholstery, buckets, a red flip-flop. We pry planks and boards of waterlogged, tar-streaked wood from between the concrete slabs, slipping in up to our knees in the filthy, whirling eddies as the current first ebbs, then flows. At the end of the second day when we return home near what we estimated to be dinnertime, Chriss dad, Mr. Dupassage, is waiting for us outside my apartment building. He leans impatiently against his orange BMW 2002, arms folded until we come to a tire-screeching skid a few feet from him. Im sure that the orange BMW is the first European car Ive ever seen. Chris says his dad can go a hundred miles an hour in it. Mr. Dupassage wants to know what is all over our clothes. Chris does not tell him that the tar on our hands and faces and shoes and jeans and our nearly identical terry-cloth polo shirts is from the wood we salvaged for the raft we are going to build. Chris says he does not remember what it is. I straddle the crossbar of my yellow banana-seat bike, studiously watching the derailleur move when I shift gears. I think that Chris might be ashamed of our raft adventure. Opening the trunk of his orange European car, Mr. Dupassage tries another tack, asks Chris where the stuff all over his clothes came from. Chris says he does not remember that either. Mr. Dupassage takes a lime green towel from the trunk and shakes white paint flecks off it onto the faded gray asphalt of the street and, draping it over the supple, beige leather passenger seat, warns Chris that he is going to have to sit right on the towel and not move a muscle the whole way home or he might get that stuff on his clothes all over the upholstery of the orange European car. I wonder if sparks come out of the back of Mr. Dupassages orange car when he goes one hundred miles an hour in it. Mr. Dupassage smiles when he says good-bye to me. He tells me to be careful not to touch the walls in the halls or in the elevator on my way upstairs, then he gets into his orange car. I think the car must be going almost one hundred miles an hour when it reaches the corner, but from where I am standing, still straddling my yellow banana-seat bike, I cant see any sparks flying out behind it. Chris is French, or his parents are, or his father is. I wonder how long it takes to get to France from Pierrepont Street. My mom calls from the window on the second floor where we live. She wants to know if I know what time it is. I look at the red LED readout on my Texas Instruments watch and I tell her it is eight fifty-six. In the elevator, when I lean against the wall, some of the tar from the raft wood wipes off my shirt onto the brown-and-white-flecked enamel wall. I suppose that French people must not like rafts very much. French people like river barges better than rafts. When my mom tells me to explain how I got myself covered in tar, I tell her that Chris and I are building a raft to sail across the East River. The East River is not, in truth, a river. It is a tidal strait that joins with the Harlem River, also a part of the same tidal strait that was painstakingly, over twenty years during the nineteenth century, hollowed out to accommodate ship traffic. This strait connects the Long Island Sound up north to New Yorks Upper Bay and the Atlantic Ocean beyond to the south. Because the narrow waterway joins two such whopping great bodies of water, the tide roars up during the flow tide, then twelve hours later, down during the ebb tide. In its narrower stretches the tide moves at speeds approaching six knots. Manhattan turned the riverbank to stone on its western bank, as did Brooklyn and eventually Queens on the opposite shore, so now, call it a tidal strait or a river, it is more a sluice than a naturally occurring body of water. People who fall or dare to jump in it have few places where they can pick their way out. The East River hosts a handful of accidental drownings every year. For this and many other reasons, the East River is no place for an eight-year-old to play. Another persons mother might have made this point immediately after her son announced his intentions to cross it on a raft that he and his buddy Chris Dupassage planned to build from found material piling up on the tide line along its rocky banks and fetid beaches. Not my mother. She supported every insane notion or scheme I ever presented to her. It was a conscious--determined, really--effort to shield what she considered my creative gift, to protect my imagination, my notion of the possible, from the crush of practical reality. The lower reaches of the East River have teemed with traffic since the earliest Dutch settlements in the 1670s, and I spent most of my childhood living up on the bluffs above Old Fulton Street, the site where, in 1814, Robert Fulton inaugurated regular steamboat-ferry service between Brooklyn and Manhattan and made Brooklyn boom. The ferry kept Brooklyns economy running, fueled its growth from Dutch farming village to throbbing Anglocentric factory town and international port until 1924, forty-one years after the Brooklyn Bridge was completed. The cobblestone streets bustled and the town became a city. The horse-drawn construction of the Eagle Warehouse and all the other warehouses and towering factories put an end to any doubt that Brooklyn was rising just as confidently as its neighbor across the river. By the 1970s, though, those factories and warehouses were slipping into decrepitude, creating a vacant canyon land where packs of dogs and kids on bikes from the various bordering neighborhoods competed for territory among the low-slung, Civil War-era brick warehouses with rusting, arched iron doors that still smelled of the pepper they once housed. Here on the flats stood a dozen monolithic, white cement factories built at the turn of the nineteenth century by the Scottish-born king of the cardboard box, the industrialist Robert Gair. In 1926, Gair moved his light-industrial empire upstate to Piermont. By the 1970s, "Gairville" had become a collection of empty or emptying monuments to the slow death of urban manufacturing. A week passes and Chris still hasnt returned to fix our raft. During that gap I check on our pile of salvaged raft mater Details ISBN1416585176 Author Manny Howard Short Title MY EMPIRE OF DIRT Publisher Scribner Book Company Language English ISBN-10 1416585176 ISBN-13 9781416585176 Media Book Format Paperback Pages 304 Illustrations Yes Year 2014 Publication Date 2014-04-19 Imprint Scribner Book Company Subtitle How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard Into a Farm DEWEY 630.97471 Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:130083157;

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