The Urban Hermit: A Memoir

A stumbled upon this book on a trip through the small town of Ridgway, PA, alerted to it by a fun, counter-culture couple that makes the best bread I ever tasted. (full disclosure). This book took me back to Hunter Thompson's earlier works -- irreverent, honest, disturbing and hilarious. McDonald's sojourn(s) through his careers, indulances and dieting ring(s) true. I would hope that after this autobiography McDonald has enough juice to continue his writing. This is like a tincture of Thompson and Twain.

The Urban Hermit was totally hilarious and got me through my train ride like no other book. After hitting bottom financially, MacDonald is forced to concoct a crazy idea to save money that consists of him eating only lentils and tuna. This story takes us through those surreal months--once the local bar regular, he starts pitching magazine stories to make the horrible time go by and lands a gig to cover the Rainbow hippie cult and is then flown to report from Bosnia. We meet a slew of equally absurd and hilarious characters in this very entertaining and funny story, including MacDonald's strange cousins and a few randoms. A fascinating insight to a generation that wracked up the worst credit in history. This book is about the extremes one guy went to in order to break those shackles. I can't look at lentils and tuna the same way anymore. I laughed out loud numerous times while reading this and so will you.

Fat, broke and sunk to borrowing money from his parents to make student loan payments, journalist Sam MacDonald dreams up the Urban Hermit plan. He will spend $8 a day and limit his food intake to 800 calories a day, with meals consisting of lentils and tuna fish. Who knew deprivation and poverty could be so funny? MacDonald's journey from the Fat Bastard to the Urban Hermit was supposed to last a month. Instead it starts with his debt during the dot-com boom and his over-stressed size 44 pants and ends soon after September 11, 2001, with his then-fiancé urging him to eat a little more to fill out his face. In the year in between, readers join MacDonald and his cousin Skippy, their life in a "brown" apartment with accidental pets, a trip to Bosnia and mistakes involving foreign money, trailer-park activism, politics and porn, and cross-country adventures with people so charming, so scary, so absurd that we want to be there. "Dumb Luck" could easily have been an alternative title to this book as both MacDonald and his cousin/roommate Skippy quit their jobs anytime they get promoted. Readers happily enjoy the outrageous ride. When the cat finds a linty ball of Ecstasy under the recliner, MacDonald and Skippy head out to the woods and discover a Dukes of Hazzard convention. MacDonald's cousin Aaron, a lovable hippie who gets along with everyone, accompanies them to the Rainbow Gathering as the photographer on one of MacDonald's assignments and ends up saving their lives while serving food and fixing his beloved van. Deprived of luxuries such as beer and shots, and lonely since all his friends are drinking without him, MacDonald wanders the streets of Baltimore, oblivious to the weight that is dropping off. Only morons would treat this as a diet and get-out-of-debt book, but "Urban Hermit" is one of the better gimmicky memoirs written today. Well-written, each chapter opens with a newspaper article highlighting the financial excesses of the late 1990s and then MacDonald goes on to describe his own circumstances in a realistic, humorous way. Part of the beauty of MacDonald's writing lies in his apt descriptions and serendipitous adventures. Rolling Rocks are $1 at Kipling's bar and MacDonald frequently compares expenditures (shoes, a sleeping bag, a new suit) with how many Rolling Rocks one could buy. MacDonald starred in an ad for Kipling's as the drunk, fat guy and vaguely remembers the role as an easy one. MacDonald says of his wife Michele on their first date, "She looked like danger and smelled like math." MacDonald's first cooked batch of lentils made me gag a little as he describes that mushy, crunchy, soggy bite. An engrossing, engaging read, with a satisfying - yet incomplete - ending, "Urban Hermit" offers a drastic and delightful look at debt and dieting.

The Urban Hermit is a quick, clever, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny book. Sam MacDonald is in his late 20s when the life that he's always enjoyed (drinking, hanging out, not really caring about money) comes to a grinding halt when he discovers how much money he owes to the IRS and credit card companies. He decides to try an "urban hermit" plan for month, where he exists on the cheapest food possible (tuna, eggs and lentils) while saving up money to pay his creditors back. Unlike a lot of other memoirs where the author decides to follow some self-improvement plan for a year, MacDonald originally plans on being an urban hermit for only a month. Due to a series of unforeseen events, he ends up being an urban hermit (with some breaks) for many, many months. During that time, we see him travel to Bosnia for a reporting job, bust a porn shop for illegal viewing booths, save a trailer park, travel to a huge hippie gathering in Montana, get what sounds like his first real girlfriend, and various other adventures. MacDonald's style of writing is perfect for a book like this, and he has a way of describing situations and scenes that will make you laugh out loud. The parts where he is attempting to cook the lentils and traveling to Montana in a VW Bus are particularly funny. If you are from Maryland or the DC area, you will enjoy familiar sights being mentioned in the book. The book around 280 pages, but is a very fast read. MacDonald is a sympathetic, likeable character and his discipline is admirable. One warning - because I know some people don't like this - there is a fair amount of drug use in the book, so if you are squeamish about that, be forewarned. If you don't care, then dive right in!

I read The Urban Hermit in a couple of hours and found that Sam MacDonald has a very engaging, honest, funny and captivating style of writing and speaking to the reader. In the introduction, he states that:"I was a big, fat bastard. No excuses. No complaints. That's just the way I was."He was having a good time, drinking, eating and hanging out. Things probably would have continued for another 10 years, had not bills and credit card debt began to get out of hand.From that point, he takes the reader along with him on his journey. I was especially amazed at his ability to stick to a radical change in eating and living, that he devised.Perhaps he didn't have any choice or maybe his inate self-respect made it hard to look for an easy way out. Memoirs often give the opportunity to walk with someone in their shoes. This particular memoir is special because the author is a good guy to hang out with. By the end of the book, I was happy that his hard work had found him with much to be thankful for.