SIMPLE LIVING: One Couple’s Search For a Better Life, by Frank Levering and Wanda Urbanska, Viking, 272 pages, $21.

If you think that this sounds hardly like a title that normally would be enthusiastically reviewed by a semiretired Old Dawg, you are absolutely right.

But Wanda Urbanska, an Orono resident and author of a previous book, “The Singular Generation,” did time as a summer intern in the newsroom of the Bangor Daily News when she was a student at Harvard some years back. As one of her alleged newsroom supervisors, it seemed only proper that I check out her latest literary effort.

As your basic advocate of the unpretentious, unembroidered and unembellished good-old-boy, down-home life, I was not disappointed in this semiautobiographical primer, even though Urbanska would have been just about my last guess as someone who would turn out to be a proponent of the simple existence.

Collaborating with her husband, Frank Levering, Urbanska tells how the couple tired of life in the Los Angeles fast lane — he as a screenwriter of Grade B movies and she as a reporter with the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.

Nearly six years ago they accepted an offer to return to his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia to take over the family orchard operation, a business decision that was by far the most sobering either had ever made.

Levering Orchard had not shown black ink for more than 25 years. But with hard work, sacrifice, and the guidance of veteran apple growers such as Levering’s father and the hired man who came with the property, they turned the operation around. By book’s end they appear to be well on their way to living happily and simply ever after.

Not only have they become seasoned professional orchardists attuned to the vagaries of weather, the whims of nature, and the neighborly togetherness of rural folk, they’ve been able to continue their work as writers, as well.

The simple life as described by the authors includes an eye-opening introduction to the joys of frugality: recycling not only the Christmas wrappings, but some Christmas gifts, as well — a maneuver that apparently is not so hard to execute once you get over the initial aversion to the thought of getting caught at it. And simple travel? It is best done on the cheap by sleeping in your vehicle rather than in a motel or, as an Aroostook County native might put it, by “cousin-ing around,” — bunking for free with friends or relatives.

The downside here, of course, is that these chickens often come home to roost, which means you must spiff up the spare room for them and wait on them hand and foot when they come traipsing through your neck of the apple orchard.

The authors write convincingly about the inner satisfaction that comes from volunteer work in a small community, the joy of not keeping up with the Joneses, and the permanence of family ties that bind.

In the end, our Wanda and her Frank find happiness in the orchard, as well as in their frequent low-budget travels to, among other places, her ancestral Poland in search of roots.

Perhaps the best part of the simple life in the Blue Ridge Mountains, they conclude, is learning that they are not alone in their quest for nirvana; that there are many others out there “who are examining their values, their priorities, their lifelong goals and are choosing to measure gain not by what they have, but by who they are, by how they live.”

Kent Ward is a free-lance writer who resides in Winterport.