The way home Tales from a life without technology

Boyle was an avid tech-user, even creating a hugely popular website, before he left the grid. Self-deprivation isn't new to him, however; he spent three years without using money, as chronicled in The Moneyless Man (2010). Here Boyle describes building a one-room cabin without using power tools or factory materials and then living off the land in his native Ireland. Never scolding, Boyle instead anchors the book with a warm, intelligent tone and thoughtful considerations. Why, for example, do we focus on giving things up when we think about more natural ways of life, as if we sacrifice nothing by depending on technology? Boyle has a column in the Guardian, and relearning how to write with a pencil instead of a computer changes far more than his writing method; it alters how he thinks. Boyle knows few people can live like he does, but positive change seems inevitable if one follows his advice to resist material trappings, revolt against industrial ecological damage, and re-wild landscapes. Boyle's anti-technology stance upsets many, making this a must-read.--Dane Carr Copyright 2019 Booklist

A man forsakes modern gadgetry for labor and the land in this knotty saga of radical sustainability. Pivoting from the project of surviving without monetary exchanges that he recounted in his previous book The Moneyless Man, Boyle built a cabin on an Irish farm and vowed to live without computers, electricity, phones, plumbing, fossil-fueled heating, clocks, or any other "industrial-scale, complex technology" that "showed no respect for life." He duly spends the book hewing wood, drawing water, growing vegetables, collecting manure, fishing for dinner, and writing diaristic vignettes by pencil and candlelight. Boyle's haphazard technophobia and critique of "the mechanizing, homogenizing, industrializing, killing culture" of high-tech society are vehement but incoherent: he forbids himself matches but allows himself bicycles, steel tools, and hitchhiked rides, and never explains why a lower-tech world would be environmentally benign. More convincing is his Thoreauvian homage-"I wanted to put my finger on the pulse of life," he writes, "feel cold and hunger and fear" and "lick the bare bones of existence clean"-to rustic authenticity; he writes vividly of Ireland's village culture, with its neighborly sharing and cozy pubs, and of the satisfactions of hard work with tangible results. Boyle's case against technology is thin, but his elegy for rural life is lovely. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A candid chronicle of letting go of and living without the seemingly ubiquitous technological connections of modern society.For more than a decade, Boyle (Drinking Molotov Cocktails with Gandhi, 2015, etc.), aka the Moneyless Man, has been disconnecting from the virtual world of money and banks. At the end of 2016, he took the next step, abandoning "industrial-scale, complex technologies"i.e., anything dependent on or derived from fossil-fuels (cars, plastics, etc.), powered by electricity (water pump, refrigerator, TV, etc.), that facilitates seamless connections (internet, phone, laptop, etc.), or that requires any of the above (solar panels, windmills, etc.). In his latest book, the author takes readers along on his experiences during his first year, from one winter solstice to the next, living in a cabin he and his partner built by hand on three acres in rural Ireland. "To me," he writes, "the most beautiful place on earth is this unsophisticated half-wild three acre smallholding in the middle of somewhere unimportant." What Boyle's writing lacks in comparison to Henry David Thoreau's transcendentalism or Aldo Leopold's lyricism is made up for by his consistently earnest self-reflection. A visit to Ireland's Great Blasket Island, evacuated in 1953 and now a global tourist attraction, revealed to Boyle that nature was recovering and doing better without permanent residents than if it were still tended by the 19th-century hand-plow or axe. For the author, the main question is whether nature is better off with us living in it hand-to-mouth like our tech-free ancestors or apart from it in our urban cocoons. Unfortunately, neither is sustainable with our current population of more than 7 billion, an inconvenient truth that the author refers to only obliquely.There's not enough space on Earth for everyone to move off the grid and back to the land, but Boyle's pleasant book allows us to at least imagine the dream. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Sometimes, when I catch myself emptying a bucket of my own shit, butchering a deer, shifting manure in the pissings of the rain, or any of the thousand other small things which make up my life - things that, at other times, would have seemed hair-brained, unethical, absurd - a feeling of "how the hell did I get here?" comes over me. This was never part of the program. Like everyone, I had dreams of success and the good life, but somewhere along the track, a place I can't quite put my finger on, the definition of those words began to change, and my life with it. Excerpted from The Way Home: Tales from a Life Without Technology by Mark Boyle All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.