Barbara Kingsolver
Hardcover | Pages: 370 pages Rating: 4.04 | 96117 Users | 10622 Reviews
Specify Based On Books Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
| Title | : | Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life |
| Author | : | Barbara Kingsolver |
| Book Format | : | Hardcover |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 370 pages |
| Published | : | May 1st 2007 by HarperCollins Publishers |
| Categories | : | Nonfiction. Food and Drink. Food. Autobiography. Memoir. Gardening. Health. Environment. Cooking |
Chronicle Concering Books Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver returns with her first nonfiction narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat."As the U.S. population made an unprecedented mad dash for the Sun Belt, one carload of us paddled against the tide, heading for the Promised Land where water falls from the sky and green stuff grows all around. We were about to begin the adventure of realigning our lives with our food chain.
"Naturally, our first stop was to buy junk food and fossil fuel..."
Hang on for the ride: With characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that's better for the neighborhood and also better on the table. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.
"This is the story of a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew . . . and of how our family was changed by our first year of deliberately eating food produced from the same place where we worked, went to school, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air."
Declare Books During Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
| Original Title: | Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life |
| ISBN: | 0060852550 (ISBN13: 9780060852559) |
| Edition Language: | English URL http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/ |
| Setting: | Virginia,2006(United States) |
| Literary Awards: | Book Sense Book of the Year Award for Adult Nonfiction (2008) |
Rating Based On Books Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
Ratings: 4.04 From 96117 Users | 10622 ReviewsNotice Based On Books Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
I wanted to like this book. I expected to like this book. And I did like it. I liked about a third of it, to be exact.In this book, Barbara Kingsolver is preaching to the choir as far as I'm concerned; I agree with the importance of local, sustainable eating. That's one of the big reasons I expected to like this. But let's go back to that word "preaching" - I used it advisedly, because, wow, does she. She spends at least a third of her own part of the book preaching, using a tone anyone who hasI had a hard time putting this down once I'd started and once I'd finished I wanted to give up NYC life and move to the country to be an organic farmer. I'm hardly joking.Anyone who eats -- and especially those who eat without thinking about where their food comes from -- should read this book. Not only is it informative and a bit scary (though she doesn't present anything terribly new or earth-shattering to those of us who have read things like Fast Food Nation or Portrait of a Burger as a
I have always been a fan of Barbara Kingsolver's work; her novels have a comfortable quality to them that makes me return a few times (except for Prodigal Summer, which I really didn't care much for). But once I discovered her nonfiction, my world changed. She was the first creative nonfiction writer who caught my eye and made me laugh, cry, and feel enraged. Had I not read her work, I doubt I ever would have been interested in writing creative nonfiction to begin with. I tell you all of this so
I read this. Then I gave it my sister, then she gave it to a friend. Where it went from then I don't know, but I am reasonably confident that this book was of no practical use to any of us.I'm tempted to say that everybody is haunted by the dream of the good life, when your eyes glaze over and you dream of escaping trouble and woe for a better way of living, but I'm probably just projecting my own state of mind here. Certainly though I can sympathise with the position that Barbara Kingsolver
This book is good, in spite of it's lower rating. It loses two stars for two and a half things:1) It is a little slow. Kingsolver is one of the best living writers of fiction, so she has a high standard that she can't quite live up to in this book. My theory is that she is too involved in it. The same talent that allows her to write amazing pieces of fiction detract from her nonfiction in that she just knows too much detail and feels too passionately about what she is talking about. Not that I
I can forgive the obvious shortcommings of this book for three significant reasons: First, I believe wholeheartedly that by purchasing as much locally grown/made food as possible we can solve our fossil fuel dependency. Secondly, by the luck of the draw I can afford to purchase food from the weekly farmers market. And finally, our household is committed to making around 95% of our meals from scratch, which started as a response to our collective allergies (nondairy, meat-eaters) but like the
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