Sarah Neidhardt’s memoir Twenty Acres: A Seventies Childhood in the Woods has been reviewed by Thomas M. Kersen in the most recent issue of the Arkansas Historical Quarterly.
“Good stories are to be cherished and shared. They also help us understand ourselves and our communities. Sarah Neidhardt has written such a story in Twenty Acres. … Neidhardt shares that magical childhood with us in a deeply personal way. … [H]er story is remarkable in the way she weaves her rich sources together to paint a picture of one family enduring the hardships of living in the Ozarks int eh 1970s. I highly recommend this book.”
Neidhardt was an infant when her parents joined the growing back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s. Uprooting their young family to move from Colorado Springs to an isolated piece of land deep in the Arkansas Ozarks, they built a cabin, grew their own food, and for years strove to escape their former lives and achieve an ideal of agrarian self-sufficiency.
In Twenty Acres, bohemian counterculture meets pioneer homemaking. Neidhardt revisits her childhood with compassion and candor, drawing upon a trove of family letters to retrace her parents’ journey from their affluent youths, to their embrace of rural poverty, to their sudden and wrenching return to conventional society. As she comes to better understand her family and the movement that shaped them, Neidhardt reveals both the treasures and tolls of an unconventional, pastoral life.
Sarah Neidhardt has worked as a bookseller, secretary, paralegal, copyeditor, and stay-at-home mother. She grew up in Arkansas and Northern California and now lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and teenage son. She is a graduate of Oberlin College.