Home to Roost: A Backyard Farmer Chases Chickens Through the Ages | 
 enlarge | Author: Bob Sheasley
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $11.49
You Save: $13.46 (54%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 368714
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.4 x 1.2
ISBN: 0312373643
Dewey Decimal Number: 636.5
EAN: 9780312373641
ASIN: 0312373643
Publication Date: July 8, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Fine book in fine jacket. just a hint of general shelf wear. Unread with no stamps, no stickers, no dog-ears, no grafitti, no rips, white pages. Fast, secure shipping!
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Product Description
Each day, Bob Sheasley leaves Lilyfield Farm and heads into the city. And each day, he brings along a basket of eggs for his coworkers at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Depending on the breed of hen, these eggs may be white, green, rose, blue, or as brown as chocolate. And they are all deliciously fresh, a taste of the rural way of life that people have enjoyed for millennia, one in which chickens have played a supporting role for nearly as long. In Home to Roost, Sheasley tells of the intertwined relationship between humans and chickens. He delves into where chickens came from, what their DNA tells us about our kinship, how we’ve treated our feathered fellow travelers, and the roads we’re crossing together. This is a story of agriculture and human migration, of folk medicine and technology, of how we dreamed of the good life, threw it away, and want it back. Modern farming has changed the lives of both bird and man over the past century. But backyard farmers like Sheasley offer hope for a return to the pleasures of locally grown food, as diverse as the chickens he’s raised on Lilyfield Farm. With wit and personal insight, Home to Roost examines of how our lives can be changed for the better, with something as simple as a backyard coop.
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| Customer Reviews:
A Book Worthy of John McPhee July 27, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
More than anything else, "Home to Roost" reminds me of something that could have been written by the great John McPhee. In books like "Oranges" or "Giving Good Weight", McPhee immerses himself into the citrus-growing or farm-market industry, learns all that he can about it, then writes about the lifestyle in a way that the reader comes to understand the processes and procedures -- and appreciate the people involved. This is what Bob Sheasley has done for chicken farming in "Home to Roost."
The book is meticulously researched and offers as much footnoted, scholarly material as a textbook. But unlike most texts, it's written in a highly entertaining style with beautiful personal touches woven throughout. We read about the pros and cons of both caged and free-range egg production, then see which one chickens might choose for themselves if left to their own devices. We witness the devastation of predator attacks on a flock of free-range hens and to the hearts of the family who had given these creatures names... Such topics as animal research, genetic manipulation, animal rights, big agribusiness, organic farming are all examined from multiple viewpoints, always keeping in mind their effect -- good, bad, or somewhere in between -- on chickens and the people who live by them.
By turns funny, touching, and provocative, this is a memorable book that will leave you feeling you've learned something important - and that you've had a wonderful time doing it!
more than just a book about chickens July 25, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
More than just a book about chickens, this is a book about life. Life as it was, life as it is, and our longing for what we've lost along the way. Sheasley's book is tremendously informative and often times funny. Sometimes it is poignant to the point of tears. It is impossible not to feel moved by this wonderful book- not if you have a heart and a soul.
POETIC / HUMOROUS BOOK ABOUT CHICKEN FARMING AND LIFE July 25, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
After just a few paragraphs of Bob Sheasley's beautifully written HOME TO ROOST, I began to hunger for a plate of his free-range cackleberries, with their rich, golden sunny sides up. After a few chapters, I renewed my vow to eschew meanly processed, hormone-laced, Big-Chicken-Industry drumsticks in favor of the kinder (usually), gentler (within reason) product of the local "organic" farm. As I finish reading the book, I find myself longing -- aching -- to spend a quiet afternoon at Lilyfield Farm and perhaps listen in as the author discusses all things poultry with his renaissance-man mentor at the other end of his garden path: an actual, honest-to-goodness Renaissance Man, seeing as how Ulisse Aldrovandi died in 1605!
The book is about equal parts poetic and humorous - and roughly the same ratio fascinatingly informative and sweetly descriptive of Sheasley's life with his wife, children, and hens on their Revolutionary War-era smallholding near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. He's "a man of hayseed roots" turned journalist, whose love for the various farmhouses and coops of his lifetime -- and for their respective denizens -- shines through every carefully crafted sentence.
I loved scenes such as the one where his wife, Suzanne, brings home her first impulse-buy crate of peeps and informs Bob that "we need a coop." Or the one where they compare their varying aesthetic perceptions of Lilyfield's ancient 1941 Ford 9N tractor. Above all, though, the book squawks and brawks with hilarious, exasperating, touching, haunting, heartbreaking scenes featuring his favorite befeathered subject. And though Sheasley's soul clearly belongs to the backyard form of his avocation, his book offers a more or less even-handed look at the industry as a whole and why, economics being what they are, Big Chicken has grown to be what it is...
Enjoyable, thoughtful, peppered with allusions to great poetry, literature, and music, HOME TO ROOST is a worthwhile read for farmer or city slicker alike -- with or without a chicken coop!
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