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Loading... Small Wonder (2002)by Barbara Kingsolver
I'm moving this to the Didn't Finish shelf although I probably will pick it up again. The essays were a bit too similar to read all at once -- a common failing of books collected from essays published in magazines and newspapers.  auntieknickers | Apr 3, 2013 |  i really enjoy reading what kingsolver has to say. it's always, always educational. among other things, this has made me incredibly excited to prepare my garden for next year's planting. "My best revenge against all the dishonesty and hatred in the world, it seems to me, will be to raise up right through the middle of it these honest and loving children." "I remembered my Japanese friend's insistence on forgiveness as the highest satisfaction, and I understood it really for the first time: What a rich wisdom it would be, and how much more bountiful a harvest, to gain pleasure not from achieving personal perfection but from understanding the inevitability of imperfection and pardoning those who also fall short of it." (  ) elisa.saphier | Apr 2, 2013 | Small Wonder, Barbara Kingsolver’s second book of essays, was written after the events of 9/11, and touches on subjects as diverse as Terrorism, why the world doesn’t like America, Genetic Modification, Teenagers, Mothers, and Self-Sustainability. While I may not have agreed with every single word of the essays, on the whole, I found Kingsolver’s to be the Voice of Reason. As with her previous book of essays, High Tide in Tucson, there were some aspects that avid readers of Kingsolver’s novels would have found reflected there. The essays are interesting and thought-provoking. The essay on Genetic Modification is particularly succinct. I would recommend this book, not just to Kingsolver fans, but to anyone who wants to read a reasonable point of view. (  ) CloggieDownunder | Mar 16, 2012 | A series of Essays by Kingsolver, which obviously spanned at least 5 years, and cover nature, family, terrorism, 9/11, parenting, and more. I loved the family essays most, especially her letter to her mother, the letter to her teenage daughter, and Lily's chickens. However, many of the others were also favorites such as subjects of terrorism, 9/11, homelessness, and others. I found this a really wonderful collection of essays on a diverse group of topics. (  ) whymaggiemay | Feb 10, 2010 | Barbara Kingsolver, novelist and naturalist, writes in Small Wonder her thoughts on the raising chickens, motherhood, television, and war. She is at her best when she writes about what she knows, birds and crabs, daughters and deserts. ( ) debnance | Jan 29, 2010 | no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0060504080, Paperback)Readers familiar with Barbara Kingsolver will find that Small Wonder, a collection of 23 essays, shows the same sensitivity and thoughtfulness, the same rich knowledge of and love for the natural world, as her spellbinding novels. In "Knowing Our Place," she describes the two places in which she writes: a tin-roof cabin in Appalachia and her home in the Tucson desert. In "Setting Free the Crabs," she uses her daughter's decision not to take home a beautiful (and occupied) red conch shell from a Mexican beach to illustrate our own need to give up our sense of ownership of the earth, to resist "the hunger to possess all things bright and beautiful." Many of these pieces, like the lovely title essay, were written (or rewritten) in response to the events of September 11, which threw into relief the growing social and economic inequities that are so little remarked on in the American media. These are political essays, although Kingsolver is not a natural rhetorician; her prose is too supple and inclusive. She is more inclined to follow the turns of her mind, like water in a curving stream bed, than to hammer home a point or two. But she has a rare gift for apt allusion (from sources as wide-ranging as Robert Frost to Beanie Babies) and for the elegant use of facts and figures. And she is highly quotable. It is easy to imagine the speechwriters and activists of the next 10 years dipping into Small Wonder for inspiration and the perfect phrase. --Regina Marler(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:52:19 -0500) "In her new essay collection, the beloved author of High Tide in Tucson brings to us from one of history's darker moments an extended love song to the world we still have. From its opening parable gleaned from recent news about a lost child saved in an astonishing way, the book moves on to consider a world of surprising and hopeful prospects, ranging from an inventive conservation scheme in a remote jungle to the backyard flock of chickens tended by the author's small daughter.". "Whether she is contemplating the Grand Canyon, her vegetable garden, motherhood, adolescence, genetic engineering, TV-watching, the history of civil rights, or the future of a nation founded on the best of all human impulses, these essays are grounded in the author's belief that our largest problems have grown from the earth's remotest corners as well as our own backyards, and that answers may lie in those places, too. In the voice Kingsolver's readers have come to rely on - sometimes grave, occasionally hilarious, and ultimately persuasive - Small Wonder is a hopeful examination of the people we seem to be, and what we might yet make of ourselves."--BOOK JACKET.… (more) |
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