Review: 'Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World,' by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen

First there was "The Dangerous Book for Boys," then "The Daring Book for Girls." Now there's a "Dangerous, Daring" book for adults: "Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World" -- which is being released today.

Now, we've had a compost bin going for as long as I can remember. We have grown all sorts of little crops around this homestead (volunteer melons, anyone?) and we wish we could have chickens (alas, so does our dog and the roaming cats in the neighborhood). But we're serious amateurs.

Like the Dervaes family out in Pasadena (www.urbanhomestead.org), "Making It" authors Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen are L.A. homesteaders who keep chickens like all the other hipsters-about-town but are also pretty much my first stop should signs of Armageddon become apparent. Why? Because they know how to build a compostable toilet using a milk crate and a toilet seat.

My husband read the details of this and after inquiring about where to get the required sawdust (my urban suggestion: a pizza parlor), started staking out a place in the backyard for one ("Do I cover it with a box like I'm homeless?" he wondered. "How about four stakes and a tarp, live it up," I suggested).

Coyne and Knutzen who also have their own urban homesteading blog, know how to make castile soap and give lengthy instructions that stop just shy of listing a hazmat suit in the ingredient list. They make soup for their dog to supplement his kibble.

There are useful tips on easy meals and basic cooking, making your own shampoo, treating cuts and bruises, how to slaughter a chicken, making a composter using shipping pallets, and how to sew cloth sanitary napkins. The instructions are thorough and very clear (and also mighty clever).

Even if you never try half the stuff in the book, it's great just to see how things are done, and how far we've drifted from living a truly self-sufficient life.

There's so much talk about green living and treading lightly on the Earth these days. "Making It" is about really doing something, even if that something only involves throwing your garden clippings and peels into a nice pile in the backyard that will one day become food for your garden.

Or, um, making a composting toilet.

Note: Coyne and Knutzen's upcoming book tour includes a 7 p.m. Friday, June 17 event at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena. For more bookstore appearances, plus classes in urban homsteading, follow the events page on their website.