cover image My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big City Backyard into a Farm

My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big City Backyard into a Farm

Manny Howard. Scribner, $25 (277pp) ISBN 978-1-4165-8516-9

Howard expands upon a prize-winning New York magazine article about converting the backyard of his family’s Brooklyn home into a farm with the goal of growing enough crops and raising enough livestock to feed himself for a month (turning the garage into a barn helped), and it’s not a pretty story. “I met my authentic self” over the six months of the project, he admits, and learns that he can be “driven, uncompromising, solitary, selfish even,” and his obsessively determined yet recklessly unprepared methods push his marriage nearly to the breaking point. At times, nothing seems to go right: Howard’s rabbits won’t breed; he severs most of his pinkie building a chicken coop; and he even manages to lose half his crops to Brooklyn’s first tornado in over a century. But his perseverance, fueled by occasional insights from agrarian philosopher Wendell Berry, pays off; the hard-fought successes, along with the unrelenting honesty with which he describes his failures, bring a grim sort of redemption to his tale. Slow-foodies and locavores may be hesitant to adopt Howard as a hero (especially given his vocal skepticism toward their agendas), but his reminder of the fundamental necessity of hard work is worth heeding. (Mar.)