It is still possible -- and immensely satisfying -- to grow or make with one's own hands just about everything one needs to live, as William Winchester shows in this eloquent journal of two years on his 20-acre prairie farm in northeastern Oklahoma.

Winchester's day-by-day account of the trials and satisfactions of subsistence farming in the 1990s is reminiscent of Michael Pollan's Second Nature: A Gardener's Education, or perhaps even Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence.