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Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Summary and book reviews of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, plus links to an excerpt from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and a biography of Barbara Kingsolver.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle A Year of Food Life
by
Barbara Kingsolver
Hardcover: May 2007,
384 pages.
Paperback: Apr 2008,
400 pages.
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."
Book Reviews
BookBrowse Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is to food as Bill Bryson's books are to travel - accessible and likely to appeal to a far wider audience than most of their genre. The one or two reviewers who criticize the book on the basis that supermarket organic foods cost too much for real people on real budgets seem to be missing the point. Not once in the year do the Kingsolver family buy a bijou package of overpriced organic vegetables from a supermarket. Instead they eschew the supermarket in favor of seeking out locally grown foods, usually grown by themselves or bought from local farmers markets - and save money in the process. Full Review (members only, 1153 words).
Kirkus Reviews
With some assistance from her husband, Steven, and 19-year-old daughter, Camille, Kingsolver (Prodigal Summer, 2000, etc.) elegantly chronicles a year of back-to-the-land living with her family in Appalachia...Readers frustrated with the unhealthy, artificial food chain will take heart and inspiration here.
Booklist
Writing with her usual sharp eye for irony, she urges readers to follow her example and reconnect with their food's source.
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Kingsolver takes the genre to a new literary level; a well-paced narrative and the apparent ease of the beautiful prose makes the pages fly.
The Seattle Times - Barbara Lloyd McMichael
Kingsolver is idealistic but also down to earth. She grouses about too much zucchini like the rest of us, and she has a charmingly self-deprecating sense of humor. All of which makes one feel churlish to complain, but I must. For even as Kingsolver and family argue that this whole effort to go back to local and organically grown foods is not elitist, they are farming their acreage, driving their hybrid car (those aren't cheap), sending Camille off to college and taking two vacations a year (one of them to Italy) ....
Kingsolver passionately pencils out the ultimate savings of going organic. It looks great on paper, but when I go to the grocery store and have to choose between the agribusiness-produced green peppers or organically farmed peppers at five times the price, guess which one I'm going with?
Dallas Morning News - Anne Morris
Who could turn down an invitation to share with writer Barbara Kingsolver and her family a year's noble experiment in eating locally? That experiment is what this always informative, often warm, sometimes funny and occasionally tedious food memoir describes.
Time Out New York - Emily Stone
The family’s pragmatic approach to the limitations of their lifestyle may be the most valuable lesson for would-be locavores. They allow themselves imported indulgences like coffee and gladly burn the necessary fossil fuel to transport themselves to an Italian agriturismo vacation. In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, as in nature, every rule has an exception.
San Francisco Chronicle- Jonah Raskin Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, might persuade readers to return to the soil, or put down new roots in rural communities. But you don't have to be a budding farmer to appreciate this book. You might come away from Kingsolver's memoir more aware of what you're putting into your body, where you shop and how you cook in your kitchen. Then, too, you might see, more clearly, the choices facing humanity that concern the survival of our species, the continued existence of plants and animals and the health and well-being of the Earth itself.
St. Petersburg Times
Barbara Kingsolver's first book in five years is not a novel but an impassioned, sensual and smart narrative about a year she and her family spent as "locavores": eating only food that they had grown or that was grown or raised nearby. It also includes Steven Hopp's cogent essays on the food industry and Camille Kingsolver's inviting recipes.
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Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
BookBrowse
(members only, 1153 words).
The Seattle Times - Barbara Lloyd McMichael
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