Manny HowardReseñas

Manny's wife Lisa is extremely successful – she has the kind of job that entails dressing to the nines and being picked up and dropped off by a driver and car paid for by the publishing firm for which she works. Manny writes freelance for big name magazines (which Lisa's employer owns) from diverse locations all over the globe about everything from Haitian dictators to bear hunting with mobsters in Russia. When a documentary project about Afghanistan falls through he begins to seriously contemplate getting a “real” job for the first time in twenty years. That's when he gets a call from New York magazine proposing an assignment in which he will use his back yard “to grow food and then, eventually, eat only that food to sustain [himself] for at least one month.” [pg 16]

In addition to lacking the usual philosophical and/or political motives for urban farming Manny is . . . I think the word I'm looking for is foolhardy – maybe even manic. He throws himself wholly into major projects on whims and anecdotal advice. I anticipate (correctly) many a catastrophe.

He retrofits his basement rec room into a propagation station, but all his transplants, painstakingly started from seed, fall over dead. Back yard protein proved as problematic as vegetables. Tilapia failed because he could not get the Vietnamese man (probably illegally) farming them in tractor-trailers down the road part with any. Rabbits failed in every way imaginable. Ducks failed when they were adopted straightaway by the kids, who forbade him to cook them. Chickens worked, but just barely. In the process of manually digging the subsurface drainage his hands go numb and he discovers that he has a pinched nerve in his cervical vertebrae. While running a table saw to build a high-rise chicken coop he cuts off his pinkie finger (it's hanging by a strip of skin) but a local surgeon manages to reattach it. The first tornado to hit Brooklyn since 1899 strikes on August 8 – just one week before he was to begin sustaining himself from the farm. It was an F-2. Much of the vegetable garden is smashed by uprooted trees from the yards of his neighbors.

Manny somehow maintains a sense of humor. Like me, he has a penchant for naming things. His house is Howard Hall, his yard is The Farm. The 40 square feet by the back fence that get the most sun are dubbed the Back Forty and the rest of the back yard the Fields of the Lord. The seven foot deep hole he dug for the dry well was the Spider Hole, his first attempt at a rabbit hutch was the FEMA Trailer, and his Toyota Land Cruiser was the Tractor. But there is lots of background noise in the story: he hallucinates the voice of Wendell Berry, he has dramatic fights with his wife, and he interjects a lot of semi-related and less than flattering anecdotes about amazingly stupid things he has done while drunk. Also, he can be unflinching about some of the more gruesome aspects of The Farm. (Let's just say that I remain convinced that meat rabbits are not for me.) Given what I know about his journalistic exploits from the first chapter of exposition, I shouldn't be surprised but I'm still a little repulsed by him at times.

It is definitely interesting to read about urban farming from the perspective of someone who never gave it (or organic gardening, or food miles, or any related subject) a second thought until paid to. Interesting both to read about his successes and failures and to read about what parts of the project he did and did not continue after the contract ended. You may want to smack Manny for a multitude of reasons throughout the course of the book – but in the end you may find yourself unopposed to splitting a six pack with him.

Mr. Howard might have thought he was being entertaining with his misadventures, but he's mistaken. There is entirely too much reportage of his marital life and his unsuccessful attempts at purchasing starter tilapia. The fact that he changed his entire life in order to write a magazine article is an indication of his flake index, not his professionalism.
Not at all useful.
I'm glad I skipped his animal adventures. His potato crop is noteworthy, though.½

I just saw this guy on the Colbert Report talking about his book and he was so funny even Stephen couldn't keep a straight face. I can't wait to read it!

I just saw this guy on the Colbert Report talking about his book and he was so funny even Stephen couldn't keep a straight face. I can't wait to read it!

not a good book for anyone that loves a living thing or cares about the food they grow. Manny Howard is the gardner that every gardner dreads might be out there. Not a fish out of water story- that could be good. This story is told with too much unneccessary violence, glorifing ignorance, bad planning and no humor. I didn't even like his kids.

wish I liked this book more--didn't like him, is most of the problem. Fascinating idea/challenge, but he drove me crazy.

I absolutely hated this book. The author had no idea how to care for livestock before acquiring living things and mistreated his animals.

I had such mixed thoughts about this book. I picked it up from the library after seeing his interview on the Colbert Report. The interview was hilarious and I loved Manny Howard's deadpan humor. The book was much the same, only with many more incidents of animal cruelty, which is why I have the mixed feelings.

The premise is simple - Manny is a writer who is asked to do a story about growing his own food in the small yard of his Brooklyn home. You know, think Barbara Kingslover, only with a wacky guy in Brooklyn instead of a person committed to the idea of sustainable food living in the country. The magazine he works for wanted his take on the "locavore" movement.

It didn't bother me so much that it wasn't his idea or that he was paid to do it. What bothered me was how little he cared for animals. He purchased animal after animal, never preparing for their arrival or even doing much basic research first. He had this crazy idea that animals were easy and all he needed to do was put up a few cages or something. He was woefully unprepared and it caused the death of so many animals. The first one might be a horrific accident, but when it happened again and again, I had to wonder if there is some sort of mental issue with him or just a pure disregard for animal life. It was really difficult and made for some very cringe worthy passages.

The parts of the book that did not deal with animals were much better. His writing style is that dry sort of humor that I found so appealing in the Colbert interview. He had such a lack of knowledge of gardening yet a crazy sense of bravado that he could just get it done. When the plants finally get growing, he deals with crazy weather. And through it all, his wife nearly divorces him.

I came away with a few things from this. a) not everyone should be a farmer. b) the author is kind of a jerk and an animal abuser. I can only hope that going through the experience and then writing about it taught him just how awful it was, the things he did to animals so that he won't do that again.½