Coop

A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting

By: Michael Perry

Narrated by: Michael Perry

In over his head with two pigs, a dozen chickens, and a baby due any minute, the acclaimed author of Truck: A Love Story gives us a humorous, heartfelt memoir of a new life in the country.

Last seen sleeping off his wedding night in the back of a 1951 International Harvester pickup, Michael Perry is now living in a rickety Wisconsin farmhouse. Faced with 37 acres of fallen fences and overgrown fields, and informed by his pregnant wife that she intends to deliver their baby at home, Perry plumbs his unorthodox childhood - his city-bred parents took in more than 100 foster children while running a ramshackle dairy farm - for clues to how to proceed as a farmer, a husband, and a father.

And when his daughter Amy starts asking about God, Perry is called upon to answer questions for which he's not quite prepared. He muses on his upbringing in an obscure fundamentalist Christian sect and weighs the long-lost faith of his childhood against the skeptical alternative ("You cannot toss your seven-year-old a copy of Being and Nothingness").

Whether Perry is recalling his childhood ("I first perceived my father as a farmer the night he drove home with a giant lactating Holstein tethered to the bumper of his Ford Falcon") or what it's like to be bitten in the butt while wrestling a pig ("two firsts in one day"), Coop is filled with the humor his readers have come to expect. But Perry also writes from the quieter corners of his heart, chronicling experiences as joyful as the birth of his child and as devastating as the death of a dear friend.

Alternately hilarious, tender, and as real as pigs in mud, Coop is suffused with a contemporary desire to reconnect with the Earth, with neighbors, with meaning...and with chickens.

©2009 Michael Perry (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

The Best

I loved this book so much I mourned when it was finished...so I started it toceven greater delight all over again. Thank you Michael Perry for such a poignant reminder of what's important.

Made me laugh and cry

Beautifully written and laugh out loud funny. I loved this book, I will definitely look for other titles by this author.

Great book!

Coop is my 3rd book of Michael’s on Audible. Its like listening to our own family stories in a lot of ways. The piece Tiny Pilot at the end by the Longbeds was very touching, and now has me searching out his music!

Listen today!

Can't recommend highly enough. This is a well written year in the life introspective on family and homesteading that is humorous, engaging, and intimate.
This is read by the author and in this case that was an excellent choice.

Loved it.

Love listening to Perry share his own work. My only complaint is that many of the chapter breaks are not managed well.

A funny interesting book

The book was cute funny and sad at times I enjoyed it but let me tell you he has quite the vocabulary! Very educated! Well done!

memories

wonderful book. brought back so many memories from my own childhood with my parents.

Very entertaining narrative

The parenting snips included were straightforward and pertinent. Informative about the trials, joys of livestock.

fun to listen too, and

Fun to listen to, and the feeling of being taken back to family life in a small community! So much sounded like my childhood.

Coop

I love this book, it was pure and honest and very funny. Reminded me of A Walk in the Woods and A Year in Provence.