http://cptv.vo.llnwd.net/o2/ypmwebcontent/mackattack/FMS%2020110519.mp3
Rabbi Donna Berman
Rabbi Donna Berman is rabbi emerita of Port Jewish Center in Port Washington, New York, was the founder and co-chair of The South Bronx—Port Washington Community Partnership, a mutually beneficial collaboration between one of the poorest communities in the nation and one of the wealthiest. She has taught at Molloy College in New York, Wesleyan University and Hartford Seminary in Connecticut and has served as the Jewish chaplain at Mount Holyoke College in Hadley, Massachussetts. Rabbi Donna Berman is the co-editor of a special edition of The Journal of Reform Judaism and is the author of numerous articles. She recently co-edited and wrote the foreword for, The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1973-2003 by Judith Plaskow which was published in July, 2005. In 2006, Rabbi Donna Berman received Leadership Greater Hartford’s Polaris Award in arts and culture and in the spring of 2007 she was honored by American Friends Service Committee for her work in social justice. In 2008 and 2010, Donna was named one of the fifty most influential people in Hartford by Hartford Magazine.
The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food, and Love
"This book is the story of the two love affairs that interrupted the trajectory of my life: one with farming—that dirty, concupiscent art—and the other with a complicated and exasperating farmer."
Single, thirty-something, working as a writer in New York City, Kristin Kimball was living life as an adventure. But she was beginning to feel a sense of longing for a family and for home. When she interviewed a dynamic young farmer, her world changed. Kristin knew nothing about growing vegetables, let alone raising pigs and cattle and driving horses. But on an impulse, smitten, if not yet in love, she shed her city self and moved to five hundred acres near Lake Champlain to start a new farm with him. The Dirty Life is the captivating chronicle of their first year on Essex Farm, from the cold North Country winter through the following harvest season—complete with their wedding in the loft of the barn.
Kimball and her husband had a plan: to grow everything needed to feed a community. It was an ambitious idea, a bit romantic, and it worked. Every Friday evening, all year round, a hundred people travel to Essex Farm to pick up their weekly share of the "whole diet"—beef, pork, chicken, milk, eggs, maple syrup, grains, flours, dried beans, herbs, fruits, and forty different vegetables—produced by the farm. The work is done by draft horses instead of tractors, and the fertility comes from compost. Kimball’s vivid descriptions of landscape, food, cooking—and marriage—are irresistible.
Wilson H. Faude wrote A Hidden History of Connecticut
Connecticut's history is full of engaging and fascinating stories--rocks that are national monuments, the "people's sculptor," football players on chapel finials, moons on the Travelers calendars, artists Frederic Church and Eric Sloane and even a Thanksgiving Day touch football game with a future president. These are tales from Greenwich to Enfield, from Sharon to Old Lyme and so much in between. Follow along with historian Wilson Faude in this "must-have" Connecticut book as he traverses the state in search of hidden history.
