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| Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (P.S.) | 
 enlarge | Authors: Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $8.56
You Save: $6.39 (43%)
New (72) Used (16) from $8.56
Avg. Customer Rating:  321 reviews
Sales Rank: 250
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 0060852569
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.0973
EAN: 9780060852566
ASIN: 0060852569
Publication Date: May 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: BRAND NEW
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| Customer Reviews:
 Three Stars for the Work involvled July 26, 2007
19 out of 32 found this review helpful
What I am getting from Kingsolver's book - as I plow through this wordiness - is something like this -
"It's the simplest idea in the world, really: a restaurant selling food produced by farms within an hour's drive. So why don't we have more of them? For the same reason that that statue down the street clings to his hammer while all the real stonecutters in this granite town [Vermont] have had to find other jobs, in a nation that now imports its granite from China."
No, Barb, your reason is not enough of an answer for me. I so dislike my peers stating some 'obvious' truth to them - like operating a restaurant only using food produced by farm's within an hours drive - when in the real world it does not work that way . . . and when you look into this restaurant in a trendy Vermont town, you read that the restaurant family has a smoked meat/sausage business also. I mean to say that when you look into some of these simplistic and singular reasons why something is done or not done, you see the devil is in the details.
I bristle at an attitude behind the sentences by Barb. I don't quite know how to put my finger on it - but I am irritated by the tone of the whole book. Fact by fact, or idea by idea - these are not bad ideas in theory - but Barbara and her family can afford to pay more for organic, have the time/land for huge gardens, live where chickens and turkeys can be raised and a whole lot of other assumptions of privilege including acting as if they were the farm folk. And then to take a snotty stance that 'of course it is so - you too dumb to see it' and read my book [which I am trying to do].
I won't do you harm by recommending this book.
Would have been better as a magazine article. August 19, 2007
19 out of 28 found this review helpful
As a book, it's uneven, contrived and politicized, with some major contradictions and inconsistencies.
Here's the message in a nutshell: To become a more responsible (and self-sufficient)citizen of the world, consider the true cost of your food: the cost of fuel to ship; the cost to the underpaid farm laborer; the cost to the land in clear-cutting, over-use, and chemicals. Better to learn how to grow your own food organically, and buy locally what you can't grow.
That's it.
The rest of the 350+ pages is filled with Kingsolver and family finding ever more ways to repeat that message, interspersed with anecdotes about their year of growing, along with several long distance trips (including one to Italy) in part, to offer more field research. Said field research could have easily been accomplished locally or by phone or internet. If one were to take the jaded view, there's a lesson here on how to have great vacations for free -- write a book including them and get the tax write-offs.
In any case, while clearly Kingsolver feels passionate about getting people on board with being "locivores" (local growers and consumers), she hasn't quite made the leap herself to being more conscious in her consumption of travel fuel. One step at a time for all of us, I guess.
Bottom line -- if becoming a locivore is a totally new concept to you, you'll find a convincing (albeit repetitive) argument for change. If you're already on your way and were hoping to read a detailed account of how someone else did it, you won't find it in this book.
 Eat Locally, Preach Globally June 6, 2007
18 out of 18 found this review helpful
I liked this book a lot. Kingsolver (and clan) are great writers, and the project they describe is inspiring and worthwhile. The part about turkey breeding alone was worth $25.
I'm a little astonished by the reviewers who found the book not preachy; the one thing I found off-putting was the smugness of it all. The barbs against urban people grated on my nerves. I live in a town (Portland, OR) that practically has a farmer's market in every neighborhood. You can find one every day of the week, and they're well attended. People here care deeply about food, and how and where it's grown, and supporting farmers. I know many people in NYC who feel the same way. I grew up on a farm, and I've lived in several regions of the U.S., and no place has a lock on ecological purity. Country folk eat Cheetos, too. (And Frito pie!) And refusing a teenage houseguest a banana? That made me shudder.
It helps to read this as a book about food, not about people. The family life depicted here, apart from Lily and the chicken-horse problem, is a little spooky. The Little House books reveal more character and human conflict. Was there no one who ever woke up cursing the heat, the snakes, the bugs? A child who rebelled against all that weeding? A moment of homesickness for Tuscon? You don't learn a lot about the people here, except that they work hard and eat very, very well. Don't expect a Barbara Kingsolver novel, just an inspiring food diary spanning a year.
Animal, Vegetable . . . Miserable?? June 25, 2007
18 out of 31 found this review helpful
This book extols the virtues of eating locally grown produce and food and is a sustained attack on agribusiness. Part of my issue with this book is its schizophrenia. Does it purport to be a food adventure, a recipe book, or a public policy commentary? It attempts to be all of the above in different places, which I think undercuts the unity of the book, which occasionally reverts to a rather preachy tone. With three different authors collaborating with in the same family, the book also occasionally exhausts the reader.
Reading about locally grown produce does make part of the book delicious and mouth watering. Of course, not everyone lives out in the country with multiple acres to till.
Nevertheless, Team Kingsolver succeed in getting the reader buying and consumption in a more thoughtful manner, questioning the wisdom of wasting so much fossil fuel in transporting foreign produce to markets everywhere so that the notion of seasonality becomes almost extinct.
 Great Message, Awful writing January 17, 2008
18 out of 34 found this review helpful
I have always liked Barbara Kingsolver's books but I am really disappointed in this one. Her message (eating locally, eating organic, staying away from animals treated with growth hormones and antibiotics, etc.) is one that the general public needs to hear and think about. Her tone, however, is so smug and self-righteous that I find it really hard to read. I find it hard to concentrate on the message because she is so conceited. And the excerpts by her daughter are equally smug and self-righteous. I wish that Ms. Kingsolver had taken a different approach to this book because she is going to turn off a lot of people that would otherwise have read this book. I just regret buying the book. Don't buy this book... Get it from the library.
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