Way Home

Product Information

So, hearing that Boyle is now using a bit more modern technology and going into cities to do talks and book signings, I can imagine the frustration with standard sleep hours, the obtrusiveness of bizarrely emotive pop music in public places; the strange lacunae one has with news after a long time away from it. (I'm glad my years off from news were doldrum ones; now is a bad time not to be informed. I caught up on politics long ago, but occasionally I still become aware of other gaps from those years: a few weeks ago I saw a report about a crime from 2014 that read like it was a huge story at the time, but I'd never heard of it before; and until I read this a few days ago, I'd assumed "U ok hun?" was just a meme-based way to be bitchy.) Have students sit in a circle with a talking piece (it could be a whiteboard marker, tennis ball, any object that is available). Only when the student has that talking piece, can they talk. Some questions for discussion to foreshadow some of the ideas in Way Home might be: Interspersed in his own narrative of the practicalities of his life and his reflections upon it is a narrative of Great Blasket Island, once a self-sufficient island but now deserted with the advent of modern technology. The island stands as a mute symbol of a former way of life. Students are to complete a venn diagram in which on one side they write the characteristics of Shane’s home (where is it, what is it like, colours, decorations etc.) and on the other side of the circle, students make notes on their own home. For the part of the circles which overlap, students are to write the similarities that exist regarding their home and that of Shane’s. Where is home for you?

Way Home by Libby Hathorn | Goodreads

Have a class debate around the proverb ‘home is where the heart is’. What does this mean? How is this true for Shane? Is this true for the students? What are some texts (picture books, films, stories, etc.) in which this is true? No running water, no car, no electricity or any of the things it powers: the internet, phone, washing machine, radio or light bulb. Just a wooden cabin, on a smallholding, by the edge of a stand of spruce.

Other Recommended Titles

My wife and I have a Nature’s Head composting toilet in our Oliver travel trailer. And because we live in the trailer full-time the toilet requires at the very least bi-monthly maintenance. When that day comes I remove the two screws holding the toilet down to the floor and carry the entire contraption outside. I generally just dump the contents in varying parts of our forest floor to allow the coco coir to continue decomposing the accumulated mass. After wiping down the toilet I refill it with coco-coir, adding two one-gallon bags of expanded fresh coco coir to the toilet, mixing in some pine pellets and a bit of natural bug-deterrent. The exercise is not something I detest nor is it gross and disgusting. It makes me feel closer to the earth and more responsible for its stewardship. Flushing gallons of fresh water down the drain every day is something we no longer participate in. I loved reading The Way Home, but at the same time, I could see problems with it as a new environmental book in 2019, aside from those already repeated ad nauseam by Guardian CIFfers. From the very start a relaxed and engaging accounting of Mark Boyle’s adventure in living for one year without technology. Mixed in with digressions of interesting personal anecdotes are Boyle’s philosophies that are based on scientific fact and not at all self-righteous or pretentious. It’s night and the dark is filled with strange sounds as Shane makes his way home. On a fence he finds a stray cat that at first growls and spits at him. But Shane talks and strokes the kitten to calmness, and decides to take the ‘Spitfire, Kitten Number One,’ home with him. No gang of boys, or avenue of dense traffic, or fierce dog can stop Shane carrying his new found friend to the place he calls home. Greg Rogers’ sensitive use of charcoal and pastel create Shane and his cat in splendid city-at-night time scenes.

Way Home - Reading Australia

Summary: A narrative of a year without modern technology, and what it is like to live more directly and in rhythm with the immediate world of the author's smallholding and community. There's a radical honesty in the way Boyle presents what he's doing: he doesn't pretend to have a fully coherent, publicity-friendly philosophy that works as a manifesto for everyone; he's doing what feels right to him according to his own personal definitions and experience. I liked this very much and found it enormously refreshing, as it's like talking to a real person, who hasn't tried to perfect everything to present to the world, someone not academic in mindset, whom you wouldn't usually meet as the narrator of a creative non-fiction book. (I had thought that, in the book he might use clear definitions of types of technology, perhaps based around the 1970s appropriate tech movement, but instead he rejects the define-your-terms scholarliness for the same man-in-the-street, or man-in-the-field haphazard usage from his columns.) It feels like hearing someone from the offline, non-media world. (As it should, after he spent so much time offline to write the thing!) From one perspective, the book could have done with more editing to polish the style and reduce repetition; on the other hand, its unvarnished, home-made feel is part of the appeal. I did not find this modern-day Thoreau so much making a statement as holding up a mirror to a world where the boundaries of human and electrically-driven technology are becoming increasingly porous, and asking, is this really a life well-lived? While I suspect that most who read his book won't embrace the same life he did (in the end, even Kirsty does not), his narrative invites us to ask what kind of life we are embracing, and is it truly life-giving? How are our minds and bodies and communities being shaped by our advancing technology? How in touch are we with our elemental connection with the earth from which we come and to which we will return? It seems that for each of us, asking these questions are important for finding "the way home."

Downloads:

A fascinating and interesting book. I liked the style of writing and I think this book is full of food for thought. This book won't be for everyone, but I certainly found it fascinating. What he did was quite extreme and sounded like bloody hard work, but he successfully (for the most part) managed to keep himself fed, clothed and healthy with absolutely minimal involvement in the industrial capitalist economy. He communicated exclusively by mail, travelled to most places on foot or by bike, and didn't use any power tools as he grew his own food, or hunted or fished for it. He describes the changes he sees around him as rural Ireland is increasingly affected by the pressures of economic growth and technological change, and his efforts to return to a more integrated and simple life. A total of about 4 and a half years, on and off, living in flats or houses that had no [working] TV aerial, some of this before the existence of BBC iPlayer.

The Wild Way Home by Sophie Kirtley | Waterstones The Wild Way Home by Sophie Kirtley | Waterstones

He mentions eating meat (deer) after being a lifelong vegetarian. My guess is he’d have to, to get energy for all the unforgiving work he has to do in a day. Way Home tells the story of a boy, named Shane, and a stray cat. Shane discovers the cat out on the streets, who is initially resistant to Shane holding home. Shane manages to calm the cat and begin the journey to taking it home. This narrative shows the frightening and dark encounters the two companions face on the way home, showing the development of their friendship and trust. Eventually, the reader is taken to Shane's home. The place that he calls home is on the streets, where Shane houses newspapers and drawings. In this honest and lyrical account of a remarkable life without modern technology, Mark Boyle, author of The Moneyless Man, explores the hard won joys of building a home with his bare hands, learning to make fire, collecting water from the stream, foraging and fishing. Let's get one thing straight: his life is NOT simple. It’s full of hard work, all day long, all seasons, one whole year where he left everything behind (all comforts of modern society so to speak), on which the book is based. He first started living at the property in 2013, after restoring the accessory-filled farmhouse in the three acre small-holding he bought during Recession of 2008. He moved out of that farmhouse, built an accessory-less cabin instead, and lived in it and on the property without ANY amenity, and did all sorts of self-sufficient work, to get by. This is his story, for that one year’s excursions. Begin a class discussion about their experience of the city. Have students ever been to the city? What were their experiences of the city? What sights and smells and sounds do they recall? Prepare by doing a google image search to have some pictures of Sydney city (during the day). Then google image search some pictures of Sydney city (during the night). Have students discuss in small groups which version of the city they preferred and why? Is the city a place for children (generally)? Is the city a place for children on their own? Why/why not? You may wish to substitute an Australian city more familiar to your students.Duration This unit will represent around three to four weeks' work in literacy/English classes. Reading the text could be undertaken in modelled and shared reading sessions by the teacher and independently by the students.