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Ditching their car, electric stove, refrigerator, running water and everything else motorized or ''hooked to the grid,'' the Brende family conceives a real life experiment to see if in fact all our cell phones, wide screen TVs, and SUVs have made life easier and better-or whether life would be preferable without them. By turns, the query narrows down to a single question: ''What is the least we need to achieve the most?'' With this in mind, the Brendes begin an 18-month trial run that will dramatically change the way they live and prove entertaining and surprising to students. Better Off is a smart, often comedic, and always riveting book that also mingles scientific analysis with the human story, demonstrating how a world free of technological excess can shrink stress-and waistlines-and expand happiness, health, and leisure. ''Deftly steering clear of dogma, never sounding like a sanctimonious scold, Eric Brende makes a persuasive case that most of us would enjoy life more by radically minimizing our reliance on modern technology. Better Off is a buoyant, thought-provoking, and very entertaining read.''-Jon Krakauer, author of Into the Wild and Into Thin Air
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Eric Brende has degrees from Yale, Washburn University, and MIT, and has received a Citation of Excellence from the National Science Foundation and a graduate fellowship from the Mellon Foundation in the Humanities. At the insistence of his editor, he now has an e-mail account at the local library but continues to minimize modern technology for himself and his family. Eric and Mary Brende have recently relocated to an old-town section in St. Louis, where Eric makes his living as a rickshaw driver and a soap maker.
