Concrete and Culture is a book of essays, mostly short and personal, on a wide variety of subjects from writing, religion, marriage, and American culture to logging, building rustic furniture, and investing.

In 2005, while home schooling his young children, it occurred to Robby Porter that an obligation of parenting was to pass along to his children everything he knew worth knowing. It took him ten years to complete his "book of everything I know" and several more years to get it published. The essays are readable, insightful, often from a unique perspective, and an underlying sense of irreverent humor runs through the book.

Although the book is structured as a series of essays, the essays are somewhat chronological and so Concrete and Culture is also a memoir about growing up in Vermont close to the land.