Sherry Chandler

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver (HarperCollins):

Meanwhile her husband, Steven L. Hopp, contributes informative sidebars despite their occasionally cute names (“Looking for Mr. Goodvegetable”). The older of her two daughters supplies recipes and the enthusiasm of a self-proclaimed “veggie hog.” The younger daughter keeps busy raising poultry and selling eggs, and Ms. Kingsolver herself somehow manages to sustain a writing career while endlessly cooking and canning. “We’re hoping our kids will remember us somewhere other than in the driver’s seat of the car,” she writes.

…

“Getting over the frozen-foods snobbery is important,” Ms. Kingsolver writes about her earlier presumptions, with the pragmatic wisdom that makes her work so solid. Ever since she grew up in Kentucky tobacco country and “sallied out into a world where, to my surprise, farmer was widely presumed synonymous with hee-haw, and tobacco was the new smallpox,” she seems to have enjoyed the benefits of a no-baloney attitude even toward things like baloney (“I understand Spam as a reasonable protein source”) and a highly functional conscience. Both serve her well in discussing the ethics of food production.

[Update: Here is a review from the Christian Science Monitor via Powell's:

"Each food item in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1,500 miles," writes Steven L. Hopp, Kingsolver's husband, in the first of a series of sidebars sprinkled throughout her book. "If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week."

Perhaps we should revive the concept of the Victory Garden.]

John Donne. The Reformed Soul by John Stubbs (W. W. Norton):

The talented young Elizabethan, son of an ironmonger, felt more compelled to be a gentleman than to remain a Roman Catholic, a lucky enough preference during the still new and brutal English Reformation. For the sake of the old faith, Donne’s mother would exile herself to the Continent and his brother, Henry, would die inside Newgate prison. John Donne was set upon success and preferment, not martyrdom.

…

Donne’s grasping son would seek to enrich himself by the posthumous publication of his father’s entire oeuvre, profane and sacred, an act for which biographers duly criticize and thank him. Because of it, we are able to see the extent to which language — what T. S. Eliot regarded as the metaphysical poet’s gift for experiencing thought as feeling and feeling as thought — gives a fundamental unity to the seeming contradictions of Donne’s life: just as climax brings an end to lust, the attainment of heaven means “an end of faith, nothing to be beleeved that I doe not know.”

Here is the opening passage from Chapter 5, “The Hijacking and Recovery of Memory,” in War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning:

Hagog H. Asadorian, like many survivors of genocide, communes with shadows. Some are dark and frightening, like the shades of Turkish soldiers, who in 1915 herded him and his family from his Armenian village, leaving him to watch his mother and four of his sisters die of typhus in the Syrian desert.

…

“When it came time to bury my mother, I had to get two other small boys to help me carry her body up to a well where they were dumping corpses,” he said. “We did this so the jackals would not eat them. The stench was terrible. There were swarms of black flies buzzing over the opening. We pushed her in feet first, and the other boys, to escape the smell, ran down the hill. I stayed. I had to watch. I saw her head, as she fell, bang on one side of the well and then the other before she disappeared. At the time, I did not feel anything at all.”

He stopped, visibly shaken.

“What kind of a son is that?” he asked hoarsely.

And, one more time, Julia Ward Howe:

“Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or of tears!

Say firmly: ‘We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.’

From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says ‘Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.’ Blood does not wipe our dishonor nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after their own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”