I'm reading this book right now and its so good. Great to see a review in the new yorker but I'm a little surprised by somewhat negative take. The land in the

I'm reading this book right now and its so good. Great to see a review in the new yorker but I'm a little surprised by somewhat negative take. The land in the valley is like 5k for 5 acres and the people are struggling to survive and often almost dying in the winter. And Conover goes and lives with them, and meets with them, helps them, as an outreach person for a local rural help-the-poor organization and reports on their lives in a fairly neutral way considering some of the craziness going on. He is definitely the center of the story, but he is also a somewhat benign character, like Nick the narrator in the great gatsby. It's also interesting that there are more well healed off-griders in some the area he is in, on more expensive land with more resources, but because he is working as a rural outreach person and probably because those people are less exciting characters, the book's focus is more on the lower income off-griders, who come to it not from some ideological reason, but from a place of survival and adventure - more like pioneers who also have grow-opps.