Book Review | Book Chatter

Animal Vegetable Miracle Book Cover

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
By Barbara Kingsolver
HarperCollins
April 2008
400pp

The Short of It:

This is a life-changing book for anyone who has ever stopped to think about where food comes from. Not preachy, just wonderful.

The Rest of It:

Barbara Kingsolver is known for the many books she’s written. Many of which, I have grown to love. What I didn’t know is that she is an advocate for buying local. Local produce, local meats, dairy, etc. There is a huge advantage to the planet when a purchase is made locally. When you think of fuel costs and what it costs to transport food half-way across the country, it just makes more sense to buy things locally.

In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Kingsolver and her family move from Tucson to their farm in the southern Appalachians for a year of growing their own food, raising their own livestock and testing out their ability to survive on what’s available to them locally. What struck me with this book is that it is truly a book of discovery. No lectures. No pointing fingers telling you what you must do, etc. It’s just a beautifully written “year in the life” memoir that happens to be about my favorite thing, food.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that this book is life-changing. It is. It really makes you question where your food comes from. As a nation, we are used to walking into a grocery store and having everything available to us at all times. Take watermelon for example. It’s available to us year-round but just because it’s available, doesn’t mean it’s good.

Think about where that melon came from for it to be available in the off-season. Then think about how much it costs to transport that fruit. If you’re so inclined, go one step further and think about taste. How fresh could it be if it was driven half-way across the country for it to end up in our shopping cart?

In addition to buying wisely, Kingsolver also touches on sustaining your family on what you can grow or raise at home. This isn’t a “how-to” book by any means but it’s gotten my wheels turning and it’s made me look at gardening in a different way. Even someone without a lot of property can grow some herbs or tomatoes to add to salads and other home cooked meals. The gesture need not be big. It could be as simple as buying produce at your local farmer’s market.

I know with my time constraints I will never have the vegetable garden that I’ve always dreamed of, but I have the land so this spring I am going to grow something. Not sure what quite yet but something good. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle has inspired me to at least try. If you’ve ever been interested in the food chain, I encourage you to read this book.

Barbara Kingsolver

To visit Barbara Kingsolver’s website, click here.

To visit the Animal, Vegetable, Miracle website, click here. The site includes recipes from the book!

To view Kingsolver’s other TLC tour stops, click here.

Source: A big ‘thank you’ to TLC Book Tours for asking me to be a part of this tour and to the publisher for providing me with a review copy of the book and a second copy to giveaway.

GIVEAWAY INFORMATION:

I am so excited to be giving away a copy of this book. If I could afford it, I’d give a copy to everyone I know. For a chance to win, read the details below and simply leave a comment under this post.

1. Open to the U.S. and Canada.

2. Make sure I have a way to contact you.

3. Giveaway is open until Sunday, 10/17/2010 (Pacific).

4. A winner will be announced on Monday, 10/18/2010.

Good luck!

The Last Town on Earth Book Cover

The Last Town on Earth
Thomas Mullen
Random House
July 2007
432pp

The Short of It:

The Last Town on Earth is an interesting story about trust, right and wrong and what people are willing to do when lives are on the line.

The Rest of It:

A friend recommend this book to me well over a year ago. In my mind, I thought it would be more dystopian in feel, but it wasn’t that kind of book at all. The story is about Commonwealth, a small town in the Pacific Northwest that gets hit with the flu during the 1918 epidemic that swept through the nation. In an effort to protect the town, the town folk decide to enact a quarantine. This means that the residents must stay within the town, and no one from outside of the town can come in.

At first, this works fine. The town is self-sufficient to a degree. There is plenty of food and other supplies and most of the folks feel that the quarantine is a necessary precaution. But as the flu ravages other towns and there is talk of war spies, the people of Commonwealth realize that they may have to protect their town from more than just the flu.

While on guard duty, Philip & Graham encounter a soldier looking for shelter and food. Graham’s handling of the situation disturbs Philip and causes him to replay the incident over and over again in his mind. The encounter affects him so deeply, that when he is faced with a similar situation, he makes a decision that puts the entire town at risk.

The story was a bit slow for me. It took a good 200 pages for me to get into it but there was something about the writing that kept me going. The depiction of the town itself was spot on. I could easily picture the setting in my mind and the main characters and the situations they faced were well-developed. I had some issues with the development of some of the other characters though. Their demeanor did not match their age, but in a frontier town in the early 1900’s, that is to be expected. Young people held more responsibility in those days.

Although this story deals with a pandemic it’s not like any of the other novels I’ve read that deal with the same topic. The flu itself takes a backseat to the other themes within the novel which include, fierce loyalty, the will to survive, trust and honor. Not a page-turner but I liked it.

Mullen’s most recent book The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers looks very good. I’d definitely read another book by him.

Source: Purchased

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