Way Home

Product Information

The author describes his life in a wooden cabin in rural Ireland, with no running water, no electricity, and no modern technology at all. No phone, no internet, not even anything battery-powered. As a result, the book was written using paper and a pencil. He describes the course of his life over a year, starting in winter, and dealing with the seasons as they change. 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. 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. That said, I think many of his ideas and efforts were admirable and worthy of attention, and it's certainly made me think about how many things I need to buy new, how much energy I use, and how much time I spend online, and whether all of things I do bring quality and enrichment not just to me, but to the world around me. At a time when I've just quit an extremely tedious and unsatisfying job in an office, it's come at exactly the right moment to help me think about what I do next, and how to achieve it, and I therefore found the book extremely valuable.

Way Home | Centre for Literacy in Primary Education - CLPE

There’s a real sense of isolation and frog-in-the-well mentality. I would have gone nuts like Nicholson in ‘Shining’ (and I suspect the author is on his way there too - or he’s extremely brave). 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?First of all, Mark Boyle's world view is the antithesis of my own. The Way Home was a free book on Audible read by an Irish voice I could understand. I was interested in the author's views on industrialization and technology and their influence on nations, communities, families, and individuals today. This book was easy to listen to and was almost poetical. It reminds me of On Walden Pond by Thoreau. I admire Boyle's willingness to put into practice the principles he taught for many years. There are many of his generation and younger who also have chosen to become more self-reliant and less dependent on technology. Boyle has taken it to the extreme. Despite all that Boyle has forsaken during this record of his first year of living off the grid, I don't believe he's found true reconciliation or lasting peace. He does not recognize the Great Creator and sees only the creation. 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. 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. I think it was fairly obvious early on that this is a course of action open only to a few people, who are willing to uproot themselves and make a lot of sacrifices, and who don't have too many ties or responsibilities to anyone else. I have a mortgage and kids to raise, so it's pretty obvious that I couldn't do what the author did - and I'm not sure I'd want to, either. I think he was a bit extreme in what he did, and in places comes across as a bit preachy and judgemental. Clearly that's the reaction a lot of people have to his work. I found it interesting that he wrote an entire book using paper and a pencil, but I thought he had a rather unnecessary crisis of conscience over his need to use a computer to type it up for publication. I'm currently writing this on an Alphasmart, a very simple tool for getting text into electronic form, so there's ways and means of doing lots of things more simply, if you have a bit of imagination. I've been meaning to read this book for some time, as I've long been interested in the concepts of "slow living", living more simply, using less and liberating myself from the worst excesses of capitalism. Ultimately, modern life squeezes us into a mould of consumption, forcing us to work hard for companies that we feel very little in common with. Mark Boyle has previously spent three years living without money, but this experiment - living on a remote smallholding with virtually no services or technology - interested me more. I've long felt I've had an unhealthy relationship with technology, and I was keen to learn from Boyle's experiences of attempting to live without it in the twenty-first century.

The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology

Well, I don’t aim to insult/offend people within the first sentence of my review but I think I would not be overexaggerating if I said that about 80% of the modern, first world population – at the very least counting 70-80% of Europe- would NOT at all be able to follow in Mark Boyle’s footsteps. I am not fully cut out for that either, no matter how much I would like to be. Kudos, Mark- you’re my new hero! 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. The author is either not a fan of music or prefers birdsongs (by thrush, goldfinch, bullfinch and magpie). He didn’t learn the tin whistle like his girlfriend Kristy told him to and he has to take her to a pub for her to tap dance to ‘electronic’ music. This is a book about trying to live, as far as is possible and practicable, without modern technology - including no internet. Yet every time I've tried to write about it, the review is partly about … things people say on the internet. But the internet is the main venue for environmental and political commentary now, so maybe that's not as ridiculous as it seems.

Also, I don’t know what the use is of cutting down trees (beech and birch) just to warm up your place (no word on how he controls wood from disease, termite) and reading paper-books, instead of ebooks because the tree loss is huge in both cases and makes his work against nature as opposed to pro-nature. Or whether he plants new trees each spring (he planted new trees in 2013 before moving in the farmhouse). 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. Way home follows a young boy called Shane and a stray cat that Shane has decided to home. During their journey home, Shane and the cat experience many dangerous encounters such as a gang of lads and a dog. Throughout this book, Shane is always telling the cat that they are close to home so the reader is left guessing as to where Shane lives. This provides children with the opportunity to imagine where Shane lives and what it looks like. When we find out where Shane lives, it is on the streets covered with newspapers and Shane's drawings of cats. Although Shane has very little, he wants to give everything he can to make sure that the cat has everything that he needs. 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.

Way Home - Libby Hathorn, Australian author and poet.

Boyle's life is a compromise - it has to be. He has given up a lot, but undoubtedly gained a lot, too. I didn't find him overly preachy - mostly I found him confused, conflicted, mournful, and a little lost as to how to connect with a society that had clearly thrown in the towel on his way of life. He may be right, though, that there will come a time when we will be forced - by our own mistakes and ignorance - to return to this way of life. Our plundering of the Earth can only last so long. And I sometimes feel myself growing frantic with my own reliance on abstract entities, corporations, and foreign governments. 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.Heartbreaking story of a genuine, caring little boy who wants to look after a scared stray kitten. Like ripped photos, the astonishing pictures convey the violence and darkness of the streets where the story is set. Furthermore, the language used, rich in slang words, also help readers enter in the character's life and feelings. Dan Jarvis’s story is a belter. It’s about love, loss, courage and determination told with his customary modesty which fails to disguise the amazing man behind the story’ Alan Johnson Picture books cover more than ABCs and red fish versus blue fish. They are as varied as novels. Many titles are intended for older readers. Way Home is one such book. The story takes place during one night in the inner city and the illustrations vividly convey a sense of grit and darkness. The streets and alleys represent danger for a boy named Shane and a wary stray cat he encounters. I found the title through a list of puctre books for older children and I kind of spoiled the ending... But some people here did the same! u.u

Way Home - Reading Australia Way Home - Reading Australia

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. Honorable mention: "a friend…..met a small village-worth of women on the banks of remotest part of Pakistan, washing clothes together, laughing, talking, being playful." (I have to put a disclaimer here: clothes are washed like this IN EVERY PART OF PAKISTAN, not just remote areas, whether a community is together at it or just a help maid or single individual!) At the end, having typed the manuscript himself so that it does get published (though swearing that he will one day write with his own pen, ink and paper that he will create himself aka quill, ink-cap-mushrooms, birch polypores and dryad’s saddle fungus), the author reminisces whether he’ll continue to live like this and mentions that he isn’t done exploring human beings, their depths and layers and how he feels we are all cloaked in from the moment we are born and he would like to see people without the masks and "ambition, plastic and comfort." My only question is how will he ever do that if he continues to isolate himself from the rest of the world? Imagine, a bearded man in a moorish Irish land whom you may meet if you go there and he may meet you if he has the time! Besides, he’s still in love with Kristy.

One has the sense in reading this work that the author does find many of these things, most essentially how his life is intimately connected with the world around him, whether it is the stand of spruce nearby, or the pike he holds in his hand after catching it, that gives up its life to sustain his. He eyes his growing woodpile and food put up for the winter and realizes that these things represent his ability to live into another growing season. He explores the complexities of simplicity, and the complexities we avoid in our technologically simplified lives. For a picture book though I would say it is rather frightening. It's a story of a boy who lives in an inner city, finds a young cat, and decides to take it home. They must travel through a gauntlet of dark and very scary incidents and places to get home. And home....