Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is a one-book country library., 29 Jun 1999
By A Customer
Carla Emery is a national treasure. This is simply the most informative book ever written on country living, the next best thing to having a live-in grandmother who knows everything there is to getting homegrown food from dreams to dinner plates plus nearly anything else you need to know. Begun as a 12-page table of contents for a recipe book in 1969, the present ninth edition has 858 pages of far more than recipes. Veggies, vines, trees, grains, poultry, goats, cows, bees, rabbits, sheep, pigs. Planning, nurturing, harvesting, preserving, preparing. Flipping pages at random finds starting transplants, breads leavened with eggs and beating, speeding up tomato sauce-making, harvesting herbs, making cider, managing an existing stand of trees, root cellar storage, soap making, brooding chicks, secrets to safe cattle handling, cultured buttermilk, cooking on a wood stove, jams and jellies, making a wool quilt. I use my "Carla book" constantly. If your budget or bookshelf has room for only one book, this is the book to buy. Yes, even before you buy mine.
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
good content, but spoiled by a terrible printing job, 16 Aug 1999
By A Customer
Review of "The Encyclopedia of Country Living; An Old Fashioned Recipe Book" by Carla Emery.I just can't believe this book. Well written, lots of good useful information, and a TERRIBLE printing job. As someone who works in the printing/publishing business, I find this unacceptable. The problem begins with the paper - dull, low-contrast newsprint that makes reading painful. The cheap paper is so fragile that my book was warped when I received it, and it's hard to turn the pages without tearing them. The binding is equally poor quality. If this were a mass-market paperback that you read once and then throw away, it might be forgiveable. But this is a reference book that most readers will want to keep for years - I find it difficult to believe that this book can least even a few weeks under normal use. It's such a pity to see Ms Emery's fine work ruined by a bad printer. I would have given this book a five-out-of-five star rating if the printing had been at least mediocre, but now I can only give it three stars. I urge the author to visit a good bookstore or library and browse the selection of reference books and see what a GOOD printing job looks like. And after that, I suggest she finds a new printer.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent information, consise & easy to understand!, 8 April 1999
By A Customer
many years ago a friend lent me a copy of her book. I loved the book so much that I ordered my own copy and her the newest edition. This book is excellent for the layperson who wants to know how to do anything from canning to buying land to making soap to easy toys for the kids. Its complete and definately a labor of love. When hard times hit my family financially in the early 1990's this book was a "Godsend", without it we would not have made it. Then a few years later when we started out all over again, this book gave us the inspiration and help we needed to survive on our homestead for 2 years without electricity and make it! By choosing to live that way we were able to pay off our farm and now are blessed! I highly recommend this book and cannot say enough about it. It should be on the top ten sellers list if you were to ask me.
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