This Life Is in Your Hands
One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone

2.5 stars. Better than okay, but not quite ... well, just not quite. Firstly, I would hesitate to even call this a memoir. It affected the fiction of being from Melissa's POV throughout, but that was a very awkward fit for most of the book. Writing about how her mom's pupils contracted the first tim......more

I have a distaste for “memoirs” which impute thoughts to other people, recite conversations the author could not have remembered or heard, etc.- I’d prefer it if it were called a fictionalized memoir or biography upfront. So that’s part of my problem here but I also found the writing unpolished and......more

I haven't read other reviews yet, so I may be the only person who is not wild about this book. Here are things that I thought made it worth reading: learning more about the origins of the health food movement; meeting some of the characters; reliving the sixties and the seventies. However, aside fro......more

This was a fascinating glimpse into the Back-To-The-Land movement of the late sixties/early seventies. I was on the very fringes of this, eating whole wheat spaghetti ("It's chocolate!" my dad would insist) and taking alfalfa tablets to ward off I have no idea what. We drank powdered milk, and we we......more

On particularly smoggy LA days when it takes me over an hour to drive 17.5 miles, I sometimes dream about ditching the city and hauling ass to the country to live off the land. These daydreams take me to Sonoma, Napa - somewhere close enough to a big city where drinking a glass of wine at lunch with......more