Kindle
$14.99
Available instantly
Audible Logo Audiobook
$0.00
with membership trial
Hardcover
$17.41
Paperback
$8.51
Kindle Price: $14.99

Save $3.01 (17%)

Promotions apply when you purchase

These promotions will be applied to this item:

Some promotions may be combined; others are not eligible to be combined with other offers. For details, please see the Terms & Conditions associated with these promotions.

Read with our free app
You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.
Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

Buy for others

Give as a gift or purchase for a team or group.
Learn more

Buying and sending eBooks to others

  1. Select quantity
  2. Buy and send eBooks
  3. Recipients can read on any device

These ebooks can only be redeemed by recipients in the US. Redemption links and eBooks cannot be resold.
Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Amazon book clubs early access
Loading your book clubs
There was a problem loading your book clubs. Please try again.
Not in a club? Learn more
Amazon book clubs early access

Join or create book clubs

Choose books together

Track your books
Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free.
Explore Amazon Book Clubs

Follow the author

Kristin Kimball
Follow
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love Kindle Edition

by Kristin Kimball (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 1,266 ratings
See all formats and editions
From a “graceful, luminous writer with an eye for detail” (Minneapolis Star Tribune), this riveting memoir explores a year on a sustainable farm.

When Kristin Kimball left New York City to interview a dynamic young farmer named Mark, her world changed. On an impulse, she shed her city self and started a new farm with him on five hundred acres near Lake Champlain. The Dirty Life is the captivating chronicle of the couple’s first year on Essex Farm, from the cold North Country winter through their harvest-season wedding in the loft of the barn.

Kristin and Mark’s plan to grow everything needed to feed a community was an ambitious idea, and a bit romantic. It worked. Every Friday evening, all year round, over a hundred people travel to Essex Farm to pick up their weekly share of the “whole diet”—beef, pork, chicken, milk, eggs, maple syrup, grains, flours, dried beans, herbs, fruits, and forty different vegetables—produced by the farm. In The Dirty Life, Kristin discovers the wrenching pleasures of physical work, learns that good food is at the center of a good life, falls deeply in love, and finally finds the engagement and commitment she craved in the form of a man, a small town, and a beautiful piece of land.
Previous page
  1. Print length
    292 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Scribner
  5. Publication date
    October 12, 2010
  6. File size
    6031 KB
  7. Page Flip
    Enabled
  8. Word Wise
    Enabled
  9. Enhanced typesetting
    Enabled
  10. See all details
Next page

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Kimball chucked life as a Manhattan journalist to start a cooperative farm in upstate New York with a self-taught New Paltz farmer she had interviewed for a story and later married. The Harvard-educated author, in her 30s, and Mark, also college educated and resolved to "live outside of the river of consumption," eventually found an arable 500-acre farm on Lake Champlain, first to lease then to buy. In this poignant, candid chronicle by season, Kimball writes how she and Mark infused new life into Essex Farm, and lost their hearts to it. By dint of hard work and smart planning--using draft horses rather than tractors to plow the five acres of vegetables, and raising dairy cows, and cattle, pigs, and hens for slaughter--they eventually produced a cooperative on the CSA model, in which members were able to buy a fully rounded diet. To create a self-sustaining farm was enormously ambitious, and neighbors, while well-meaning, expected them to fail. However, the couple, relying on Mark's belief in a "magic circle" of good luck, exhausted their savings and set to work. Once June hit, there was the 100-day growing season and an overabundance of vegetables to eat, and no end to the dirty, hard, fiercely satisfying tasks, winningly depicted by Kimball.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Journalist Kimball accepts an assignment to interview a lanky, determined Pennsylvania farmer who runs a community farm supplying subscribers with beef, chicken, pork, vegetables, and grains. He may look a rustic, but he has a college degree and a burning passion for natural living and initiating a barter economy. The interview very quickly turns into something of a date. His visit to her on the Lower East Side of Manhattan only intensifies these two disparate characters’ mutual attraction, and they soon launch a dream farm in the Adirondacks. She proves an eager, but inept, partner who must quickly shed her urban inhibitions and learn to slop pigs and slaughter chickens. Planning a wedding that will satisfy both the couple’s rustic friends as well as her urbane family proves daunting. Kimball has a gift for throwing into high relief contemporary Americans’ disconnect between farm-life realities and city ambitions. --Mark Knoblauch

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B003UV8TBI
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Scribner; Reprint edition (October 12, 2010)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 12, 2010
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 6031 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 292 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 1,266 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Kristin Kimball

Kristin Kimball

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Kristin Kimball is a farmer and a writer living in northern New York. Prior to farming, Kimball worked as a freelance writer, writing teacher, and as an assistant to a literary agent in New York City. A graduate of Harvard University, she and her husband Mark have run Essex Farm since 2003, where they live with their daughter, Jane.

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
1,266 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Remarkable
Reviewed in the United States on March 15, 2011
Verified Purchase
I was not (am not, really) wild about the title of this book. I heard the author on NPR and that was just okay. But I really wanted to read about first generation farmers, and that desire overrode any misgivings.

Well, this book exceeded any expectation I had. Within the first few pages, it becomes clear that this is not an ordinary memoir, that this is a memoir by a professional writer who just happened to stumble into some interesting subject matter. Her ability to sketch people, so clearly that suddenly you KNOW them, and to do it in just a few sentences is amazing- in this capacity, Kimball is on par with great fiction writers (Faulkner, Austen, Twain).

This is not a flowery book, but it is beautiful. In this way, it reminds me of the Little House books- unsentimental prose that is nonetheless compelling, breathtaking.

There is a lot in this book, not just the complete upending of the author's life, not just the work, luck, and skill that went into Essex Farm, not just the stories of how farms fail and how farming must be remade. At the heart of this book, there is the story of a marriage. It was told in a quiet way, as if to take a backseat to everything else crammed into the story, but it is deeply intimate. Her love for her husband, both in spite of and because of his eccentricities, is visible in every line, but when she tells of her misgivings and fears of committing to him, it makes this story so full that it isn't just a memoir anymore, it becomes literature.

The last line of this book is the best ending note that I have ever read in nonfiction.

After the joy of "The Dirty Life", I am certain to a second book by Kristin Kimball, if the public is lucky enough to get another one.

I read this book aloud to my husband, and at the end of it, he said he wanted to reread it every year of his life, so I know it's not just me. It's just that good.
10 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
JLS
5.0 out of 5 stars A Well-Written Memoir, Heartfelt and True
Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2012
Verified Purchase
In "The Dirty Life", author and farmer Kristin Kimball tells a powerful story. Her story of the joys and labors of building a farm with her husband is fascinating and uplifting. It's an endearing story that could have been set in many corners of the world. It's timeless.

Kimball glosses over none of the details of building a life and livelihood with soil, rain, sunshine and work. You'll be exhausted just reading about the dawn-to-night labor of two farmers trying to build a life and career together. And, you'll be either queasy or intrigued - or both- by some of the particulars of life and death with farm animals. She shares it all.

The author pulls off an amazing bit of writer's magic. In "The Dirty Life", she manages to both romanticize and de-romanticize farming at the same time. I came away from the book moved and envious of the passion, mission and gratification that the farming life has given her and her husband. At the same time I was left absolutely terrified at the thought of ever having to put in the backbreaking and often-unfair work of a farming life.

For city-dwellers like me, reading about city slickers turned farmers is part fantasy and part jealousy. She describes a life that any of us could have, but few of us would likely succeed at. Kimball manages to make the farming life seem both accessible and all-but-impossible.

Which I suppose it is.
2 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
Susan Alviene
4.0 out of 5 stars Moved and Inspired
Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2016
Verified Purchase
The patience with and acceptance of her own self discovery coupled with the clear-eyed love of the work of farming and partnership was a revelation. Life isn't meant to be easy, it is pain and suffering with bursts of sweet joy and laughter. How much happier we would all be if we came to appreciate the work of life as Kristin Kimball teaches us.
The narrative is light as a summer breeze and as hopeful as spring buds. But Kristin does not shirk the loss caused by change, the passing of loved ones and the certainty of winter.
A great read that had me cheering, laughing and chocking tears. Three cheers for all those on Essex Farm.
Helpful
 Report
Kathleen B. Walker
5.0 out of 5 stars I loved this memoir
Reviewed in the United States on September 1, 2015
Verified Purchase
I grew up in an agricultural community. My family owned a cotton farm they rented out to farmers each season, but I never lived on the farm. As a young girl I did raise ducks and chickens, but in a pen in town. I’ve always held a romantic vision of someday actually living on a farm, having a garden, maybe some horses and chickens.
So it was with this idyllic vision of farming that I eagerly read Kristin Kimball’s The Dirty Life, a memoir about establishing a “whole foods” farm with her husband. I learned so much from this book: about farming and about life.
There is so much WORK involved in farming and so much RESPONSIBILITY for living things. As Kristin shows us, there are just some things that can’t be put off until tomorrow…like milking the cow despite a heavy snowstorm or planting potatoes during the night in anticipation of a coming rain.
Kristin and Mark developed strong working relationships with the animals on their farm and dealt with most every possible situation. Their first milk cow was attacked by dogs, they lost baby turkeys to a weasel, and they had to put their trusted draft horse, Silver, down when he broke his leg. Kristin realized she was truly becoming a farmer when she became less emotional about loss…of an animal or a crop… to death of all kinds. She learned that death is just the other side of life.
I was impressed with the determination and work it took to keep weeds out of the vegetable gardens without using pesticides of any kind. I will never choose an organic vegetable over a conventionally raised one without thinking of all the work it takes to make that healthy difference in what we choose to eat.
My husband did grow up on a cotton farm, and I have heard him say that farming, simply put, was optimism, turned to despair, turned to prayer. This seems to complement Kristin’s view of agriculture: Farmers toil. Nature laughs. Farmers weep.
I realize that my romantic vision of a farm was far from the real thing. I’ve learned what I yearned for was basically a house in the country, with a garden and some pets.
Mark and Kristin have truly earned the title of Farmer. I have such admiration and respect for them and for how they have gone about achieving their dream of providing whole food for their family and their community.
I loved this memoir.
26 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
Cliente Amazon
5.0 out of 5 stars Journalism at its best
Reviewed in the United States on April 5, 2024
Verified Purchase
Journalism at its best.
Helpful
 Report

Top reviews from other countries

Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting!!
Reviewed in Canada on December 25, 2020
Verified Purchase
Well written, informative and entertaining. Lots of intriguing details.
Report
CelticMoonGoddess
5.0 out of 5 stars Lovely Heartfelt Life Story
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 30, 2022
Verified Purchase
I enjoyed reading this book and its realistic, openness and honesty into the reality of living a "simplier" life and how you dream it is. It had me laughing, crying, inspired, motivated, cheering on and wishing for a happy ending.
A lovely book to inspire and motivate following your heart's push to live a life that sings and opens your soul with a realistic glimpse of keeping going and having a good partnership in life and love to keep going through the ups and downs, with lots of ups to keep you going during the downs.
Report
anteide
4.0 out of 5 stars Work work work
Reviewed in Germany on April 6, 2013
Verified Purchase
Wow! She came from a relatively life as a journalist in NewYork to fall in love with a madman and finds herself suddenly submerged in dirty farm work without any , and I mean any, comfort except the strong (and smelly) arms of her lover. Geeeeze, even after they succeed in the end, work, work, work. I got to love my small garden with my homegrown vegetables and shall never ever again complain about weeding. Was a fun read, that makes you appreciate your own life :-)
Report
Laura Bridget Whiteway
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in Canada on September 19, 2016
Verified Purchase
love love love
Report
Vibha Naveen Nagpal
2.0 out of 5 stars Not for animal lovers and vegetarians
Reviewed in India on July 31, 2016
Verified Purchase
The book is page turner for the first section. But the farming details have less to do with (organic) farming and more with how to butcher an animal or kill a bird. Maybe that's how life is on farms and ranches but I could not read those details and had to skip many pages...
Report
Report an issue

Does this item contain inappropriate content?
Report
Do you believe that this item violates a copyright?
Report
Does this item contain quality or formatting issues?
Report