The beloved memoirist and bestselling author of Population: 485 reflects on the lessons he’s learned from his unlikely alter ego, French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne
“The journey began on a gurney,” writes Michael Perry, describing the debilitating kidney stone that led him to discover the essays of Michel de Montaigne. Reading the philosopher in a manner he equates to chickens pecking at scraps—including those eye-blinking moments when the bird gobbles something too big to swallow—Perry attempts to learn what he can (good and bad) about himself as compared to a long-dead French nobleman who began speaking Latin at the age of two, went to college instead of kindergarten, worked for kings, and once had an audience with the pope. Perry “matriculated as a barn-booted bumpkin who still marks a second-place finish in the sixth-grade spelling bee as an intellectual pinnacle … and once said hello to Merle Haggard on a golf cart.”
Written in a spirit of exploration rather than declaration, Montaigne in Barn Boots is a down-to-earth (how do you pronounce that last name?) look into the ideas of a philosopher “ensconced in a castle tower overlooking his vineyard,” channeled by a Midwestern American writing “in a room above the garage overlooking a defunct pig pen.” Whether grabbing an electrified fence, fighting fires, failing to fix a truck, or feeding chickens, Perry draws on each experience to explore subjects as diverse as faith, race, sex, aromatherapy, and Prince. But he also champions academics and aesthetics, in a book that ultimately emerges as a sincere, unflinching look at the vital need to be a better person and citizen.
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“Would you enjoy listening for five hours to a Wisconsin volunteer fireman discoursing on a sixteenth-century French essayist? You bet. Michael Perry is a contemporary equivalent of the traditional American humorist exemplified by Mark Twain…who balances common sense with a droll, biting wit. Far from the wise yokels of old, Perry possess a voice and delivery that could easily fit the anchor’s chair of any major news network. He is funny and engaging, and he knows his stuff. These few hours really do tell you a great deal about Montaigne, and literature and philosophy, and firefighting, and a whole lot more that you wouldn’t think would be relevant or funny—but is. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
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