Product Description

Helen and Scott Nearing, authors of Living the Good Life and many other bestselling books, lived together for 53 years until Scott's death at age 100. Loving and Leaving the Good Life is Helen's testimonial to their life together and to what they stood for: self-sufficiency, generosity, social justice, and peace.
In 1932, after deciding it would be better to be poor in the country than in the city, Helen and Scott moved from New York Ciy to Vermont. Here they created their legendary homestead which they described in Living the Good Life: How to Live Simply and Sanely in a Troubled World, a book that has sold 250,000 copies and inspired thousands of young people to move back to the land.
The Nearings moved to Maine in 1953, where they continued their hard physical work as homesteaders and their intense intellectual work pormoting social justice. Thirty years later, as Scott approached his 100th birthday, he decided it was time to prepare for his death. He stopped eating, and six weeks later Helen held him and said goodbye.
Loving and Leaving the Good Life is a vivid self-portrait of an independent, committed and gifted woman. It is also an eloquent statement of what it means to grow old and to face death quietly, peacefully, and in control. At 88, Helen seems content to be nearing the end of her good life. As she puts it, "To have partaken of and to have given love is the greatest of life's rewards. There seems never an end to the loving that goes on forever and ever. Loving and leaving are part of living."
Helen's death in 1995 at the age of 92 marks the end of an era. Yet as Helen writes in her remarkable memoir, "When one door closes, another opens." As we search for a new understanding of the relationships between death and life, this book provides profound insights into the question of how we age and die.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #258354 in Books
• Published on: 1993-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.com Review
Helen and Scott Nearing wrote Living the Good Life and many other best-selling books about working hard, living simply and self-sufficiently while saving time for fun and pursuits of the intellect. This is a book written by Helen after Scott died (at 100 years old!), and is a story of love and living and dying on one's own terms, at peace with the world and with one's own heart. Inspiring and moving, this is a "how-to" book about facing life with delight and with eyes open.

From Library Journal
This quiet and reserved memoir is a tribute to the "good life" and the ideals of self-sufficiency, simplicity, socialism, and pacifism that Helen and Scott Nearing shared for 53 years. Helen was 24 years old in 1928 when she met Scott, a married 45-year-old economics professor who had been blacklisted by universities and publishers for his radical views. In 1932, the Nearings left New York City for a Vermont farm, beginning the homesteading life described in their Living the Good Life (1954), the bible of the back-to-the-land movement. Later, they moved to Maine where, during the 1960s and 1970s, they played host to 2000 visitors a year. For Scott and Helen, old age was a "time of fulfillment. Scott kept his strength and bearing all through his last decades." But as he neared his 100th birthday in 1983, he chose to leave the good life peacefully by fasting. Helen is a modest narrator, at times so self-effacing that she switches into third person as when she discusses her relationship with the Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti. Still, her eloquent chapter on death and old age and her loving portrait of a remarkable man makes this a recommended purchase for public libraries.
- Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
In this soft-spoken memoir, Nearing (Simple Food for the Good Life, 1980, etc.), on her own since husband Scott's 1983 death, gives her version of their steadfast life together. The Nearings are best known, of course, for following a path of ``voluntary simplicity,'' chosen after Scott's academic exile and powered by an unwavering devotion to each other and to ``natural living in simple wholesome surroundings.'' Here, Helen explains how she came to this principled partnership after a free- spirited childhood with slightly offbeat parents and utterly ordinary siblings. After training as a violinist and enjoying a brief but intense friendship with the young Krishnamurti, she found in Scott both inspiration and abiding comfort. They took to the woods of Vermont (and then to Maine to escape developers) with no apparent regrets and lived austerely for more than 50 years. And though Helen tends to present herself as a self-effacing junior partner, she clearly pulled her weight; and while some readers may find Scott's uncompromising posture too inflexible--he refused contact with his older son (and cherished grandchildren) because the man worked for Henry Luce--there's no doubting the sincerity of their convictions. This affecting possible last testament characterizes the Nearings' life together as ``an interchange of essences'' from romantic first encounter to Scott's chosen death by starvation. ``To have partaken of and to have given love,'' Helen says, ``is the greatest of life's rewards.'' (Sixteen photographs--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

A Wonderful & Memorable Recollection By Helen Nearing!
In today's youth-obsessed contemporary culture, it is a rare treat to be able to find a book so full of loving wisdom written by someone so involved socially, politically, and spiritually in the events of the 20th century. Therefore, I was enthralled in reading Helen Nearing's moving, absorbing and often quite disarming recollections and reflections on her life, both as an individual and as the lifetime partner of one of the most celebrated critics, iconoclasts and individualists of our time, economist, philosopher and social critic Scott Nearing.

The two lived lives singularly devoid of apologies, half-efforts, or excuses, living it largely on their own terms, based on their own labors and ingenuity. Early in the 1930s they struck out from New York City to escape the Depression and social convention by starting a revolutionary experiment in rural Vermont. In many respects the experiment succeeded, yet they were never able to transform it from a personal adventure to one more largely social and community-based in the Vermont setting. With the coming of ski resorts and encroaching exurbia in the early 1950s, the Nearings moved once again to rural Penobscot Bay in Maine to start again.

Of course, in due time they were suddenly "discovered" by the baby boomers and the counterculture in the late 1960s, and became the elder statesmen of the `back-to-the-land' movement of the late sixties and early seventies. In all this, Scott and Helen continued in their commitment to a socially aware, civically responsible, and environmentally sustainable way of living. By the time Scott died at age 100 in the early 1980s, thousands of curious counterculture hopefuls made the pilgrimage to visit with the Nearings at their celebrated farm in rural coastal Maine.

This is a lovely, thoughtful, and wise book, full of the almost endless love and care and compassion Helen Nearing brought to all of her endeavors for her many decades of purposeful and socially responsible living. This book is no small treasure; it looms large and lovely for those who are aware of the incredible journey the Nearings made as fellow citizens, and also of the loving and special relationship these two rugged individualists shared. I have read it several times, and love having it on my bookshelf. I suspect you will too.

A window into "The Good Life" of two remarkable people
I discovered Helen and Scott's books in the early 1970s and they inspired and sustained me as I planned my escape from urban California. Not long before she died, Helen reviewed my book and gave it a wonderful testimonial which I will always cherish. No other two people have had a greater influence on the back-to-the-land movement. Helen and Scott were born to privilege and rejected it to live lives that showed by example their commitment to right living. They were vegetarians, they raised most of their food, and they were remarkable in their physical and intellectual capacities. Their physical bodies are dead but their spirits live on in the lives of those now living the good life because of their example. After Scott died at the age of 100 by purposefully not eating, Helen wrote this candid book that gives insight into their private lives and reveals their deep convictions.

A book worth owning
Having encountered the Nearings in Mother Earth News in the 70's I quickly became an avid admirer as well as a sincere follower of their wisdom. Thus I was overjoyed to buy Helens book because it allowed me to see a side of both Scott and Helen I never knew that well. The man whom I had admired as a wise soul but a tad put off by people, comes across as such a loving and yes "romantic" soul which made me like him even more. And Helen sharing how she was raised and the experiences she had and how she was encouraged by Scott to spread her wings and not allow him to fence her in, is a must read for any woman who questions where she belongs in the whole life circle.

We must own a good five hundred books that we love, but this book is amongst a handful that get read and re-read over and over, with something new being learned each time. I also think the book like all their books is a must read, because it reminds us how fascists this country (united states) has been and can be and the price sincere patriots often pay. As well as the value of taking the path less traveled and not relinquishing ones personal integrity or perseverance. And that in the end the good guy can win.