Sherry Chandler

from the NYTimes Book Page

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.”

1. Saturday morning on the NYTimes Book Page
2. From the Book Page
3. The NYTimes Reviews Books
4. Joy Bale Boone Symposium
5. An Alternative Book List

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