FREE: Driveway Diaries, by Tim Brookes

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Paperback, Brand New
4 Out of 5 Stars: A Road Less Traveled
Amazon Review By Jeff Mannix on January 13, 2006
Tim Brookes, a Brit who discovered American atop a bicycle, settled in Burlington, Vermont with a plumb teaching job at the state university and never left. Now director of the writing program at Champlain College, Brookes has compiled a number of winsome essays about moving with his family thirty-five miles out into the country, to grow intellectually among the pure forces of nature then ultimately rue "the balance of power between order and chaos," as Brookes now ruefully philosophizes.

The Driveway Diaries: a Dirt Road Almanac emerged from a regular column Brookes wrote for a local newspaper, and many of his musings about exurbia have been broadcast on National Public Radio's Sunday Weekend Edition, and most recently excerpted in Harper's Magazine. The book chronicles the first seven years of living just beyond the suavities taken for granted in a city, and as the realities of unassisted living supplant the expectations of harmonious enlightenment, Brookes staves off organic dementia by writing eloquently in sixty-three essays about unimproved existence.