Product Description

In her early thirties, Louise Dickinson Rich took to the woods of Maine with her husband. They found their livelihood and raised a family in the remote backcountry settlement of Middle Dam, in the Rangeley area. Rich made time after morning chores to write about their lives. We Took to the Woods is an adventure story, written with humor, but it also portrays a cherished dream awakened into full life. First published 1942.

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The other reviews are right!        Rating:

I'm just going to give this book a well-deserved "five stars", and let you read the wonderful reviews from other readers.

Entertaining and thought provoking        Rating:

A really good read that satisfied the armchair hermit that lurks very close to the surface of my life. Louise Rich's account of her life in backwoods Maine during the 1930's and 40's was filled with insightful, witty and meaningful observations of what it takes to live this kind of life and how much she really loved it. I enjoyed all 11 chapters with their cute, questioning titles such as:

Chapter IV: Isn't Housekeeping Difficult (Louise says: NO, as she's no housekeeper).

Chapter V: Aren't the Children a Problem (to which Louise quips: Aren't children always a problem, no matter where you live?)

Chapter VIII: Aren't You Ever Frightened? (sage Louise says: There's nothing to be afraid of in the woods -- except yourself).

Rich's folksy, honest and sometimes acerbic New Englander writing style is refreshing and engaging and you take away alot of deeper truths that are just as applicable to living in 2010 as in 1940.

Living Away from it All        Rating:

While this book was written over 50 years ago, I found it quite contemporary. Louise Rich writes in a down home fashion about everyday events in the North Woods with humor and a very unique voice. She occasionally bursts into a vein of discription of her surroundings that is lyrically satisfying without becoming cloying.I would have enjoyed knowing this author, perhaps spending an afternoon over a pot of tea.

I've read it 4 times now!        Rating:

I've owned this book for years; I found a first edition in perfect condition at an estate sale & I've been hooked ever since! I've read it four times along with the others in her collections of books and I've spent a week up at Lakewood Camps in 07 and 09 and plan on going back in 2011. This is a great book and I can't recommend it more!

OH, TAKE ME TO THE WOODS AGAIN, LOUISE!        Rating:

I was eight years old when Louise Dickinson Rich's thick book appeared, its jacket cover inviting me down a snowy path to a snug home in the pines. It was my first adult book; the fact that Mother was reading it at the same time gave the experience added zip.

The book is not a biography, not even a memoir. Instead, in a very informal, conversational style, Rich answers key questions people have asked her about her life as a writer, a wife, and a mother deep in the far north woods of Maine. One question per chapter: "Aren't You Afraid? Don't You Get Bored? How Do You Make A Living?" Her answers are candid, funny, detailed, and enlightening.

When, as a young bright college student, Louise had men breathe into her ear, "I NEED you!" she took the avowals with a few grains of salt. But when her husband Ralph comes racing into their snow-wrapped log house with blood dripping down his arm and bellows, "Louise, where ARE you? I need you, goddammit!"--she knows it's stark truth.

Rich's backwoods life details an earlier time, of course (the late Thirties), but even in that time, her way of life was an anomaly. "Outsiders" thought her life must be quaint, or picturesque, or outlandish.

Rich's no-nonsense approach sweeps these fantasies aside and shows us the reality of, say, making a week's worth of dinners out of three tins of chipped beef and a box of soda crackers. Or dealing with a sudden inflamed appendix when the snow has closed all roads to Outside, but the ice on the lake is too thin to drive across. Or why she enjoys being the preferred partner on the other end of a cross-cut saw. And how you make a satisfying community out of two other families, three heavy-drinking loggers, and a picturesque but comfort-loving sled-dog.

I loved this book when I was eight, and again when I was in my twenties. Reading it for the third time now in my seventies (delighted that it was still available at amazon.com), I find it does more than "hold up" as a delightful read; it satisfies as thoroughly as one of Louise's long-simmered deer roasts must have done.

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