I find the contrived home-spun common sense and naivety of contemporary books to be irritating, but with Euell Gibbons as the narrator I'm taken back to a simpler era (which may exist only in the popular imagination, but which still has an impact on those of us who from time to time rush through life). Rather than a how-to guide for foraging, I read in this book a way of living which stresses that, to use an already overused but apt phrase, we all stop to smell the roses once in a while. ( )