A Year of Food Life
By: Barbara Kingsolver
Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp, Camille Kingsolver
Length: 14 hrs. and 35 mins
Unabridged Audiobook
Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, Art & Literature
4.4 out of 5 stars4.4 (2,115 ratings)
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle A Year of Food Life.
Kingsolver was born in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1955 and grew up in Carlisle, Kentucky.[2][3] When Kingsolver was seven years old, her father, a physician, took the family to Léopoldville, Congo (now Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo). Her parents worked in a public health capacity, and the family lived without electricity or running water.[2][4]
After graduating from high school, Kingsolver attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, on a music scholarship, studying classical piano. Eventually, however, she changed her major to biology when she realized that “classical pianists compete for six job openings a year, and the rest of [them] get to play ‘Blue Moon‘ in a hotel lobby”.[3]
She was involved in activism on her campus and took part in protests against the Vietnam war.[2] She graduated Phi Beta Kappa[5] with a Bachelor of Science in 1977, and moved to France for a year before settling in Tucson, Arizona, where she lived for much of the next two decades. In 1980, she enrolled in graduate school at the University of Arizona,[3] where she earned a master’s degree in ecology and evolutionary biology.[6][7]
Kingsolver began her full-time writing career in the mid-1980s as a science writer for the university, which eventually led to some freelance feature writing, including many cover stories for the local alternative weekly, the Tucson Weekly.[3][7] She began her career in fiction writing after winning a short story contest in a local Phoenix newspaper.[3]
In 1985, she married Joseph Hoffmann; their daughter Camille was born in 1987.[8][9]
She moved with her daughter to Tenerife in the Canary Islands for a year during the first Gulf War, mostly due to frustration over America’s military involvement.[10]
After returning to the US in 1992, she separated from her husband.[9]
In 1994 Kingsolver was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from her alma mater, DePauw University.[11] In the same year, she married Steven Hopp, an ornithologist, and their daughter, Lily, was born in 1996.[2] In 2004, Kingsolver moved with her family to a farm in Washington County, Virginia, where they currently reside.[2]
In 2008, she received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Duke University, where she delivered a commencement address entitled “How to be Hopeful”.[12]
In the late 1990s[13] she was a founding member of the Rock Bottom Remainders,
a rock and roll band made up of published writers. Other band members include Amy Tan, Matt Groening, Dave Barry and Stephen King, and they play for one week during the year. Kingsolver played the keyboard, but is no longer an active member of the band.[13]
In a 2010 interview with The Guardian, Kingsolver says, “I never wanted to be famous, and still don’t, […] the universe rewarded me with what I dreaded most”. She said she created her own website just to compete with a plethora of fake ones, “as a defense to protect my family from misinformation. Wikipedia abhors a vacuum.
If you don’t define yourself, it will get done for you in colorful ways”.[14]
Kingsolver lives in the Appalachia area of the United States. She has said that friends
in the urban literary community disparage rural areas such as Appalachia, but also that the COVID-19 pandemic might change these types of opinions as people move away from cities to practice social distancing long-term.[15]
Local-eating experiment
Starting in April 2005, she and her family spent a year making every effort to eat food produced as locally as possible.[16] Living on their farm in rural Virginia, they grew much
of their own food, and obtained most of the rest from their neighbors and other local farmers.[17] Kingsolver, her husband and her elder daughter chronicled their experiences that year in the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Although exceptions were made for staple ingredients which were not available locally, such as coffee and olive oil, the family grew vegetables, raised livestock, made cheese and preserved much of their harvest.[16][18]
Writing career
Kingsolver’s first novel, The Bean Trees, was published in 1988, and told the story of a young woman who leaves Kentucky for Arizona, adopting an abandoned child along the way; she wrote it at night while pregnant with her first child and struggling with insomnia.[7] Her next work of fiction, published in 1990, was Homeland and Other Stories, a collection of short stories on a variety of topics exploring various themes from the evolution of cultural and ancestral lands to the struggles of marriage.[19]
The novel Animal Dreams was also published in 1990,[20] followed by Pigs in Heaven,
the sequel to The Bean Trees, in 1993.[21] The Poisonwood Bible, published in 1998, is one
of her best known works; it chronicles the lives of the wife and daughters of a Baptist missionary on a Christian mission in Africa.[22] Although the setting of the novel is somewhat similar to Kingsolver’s own childhood trip to the then Republic of Congo, the novel is not autobiographical.[2]
Her next novel, published in 2000, was Prodigal Summer, set in southern Appalachia.[23] The Lacuna was published in 2009; and Flight Behavior, was published in 2012.
It explores environmental themes and highlights the potential effects of global warming
on the monarch butterfly.[24]
Jonathan Pulliam • States
The late acclaimed novelist Michael Crichton pioneered the use of footnotes and full references for HIS masterful 2004 climate controversy novel “State of Fear”. Though I’ve not yet read “Flight Behaviour”, “State of Fear” so raised the bar for novelistic innovation and attention to verifiable detail, it makes me wonder if Kingsolver hasn’t bitten off more than she can chew: “… the struggles and realizations of the characters effectively emphasizes Kingsolver’s assertion that there are no legitimate excuses to ignore climate change.”
One must work to set aside our normal human ego-centricity when considering the likely validity of such assertions, given what we do know about the periodicity of past terrestrial ice ages. The most “rapid-change” in both warming and cooling periods occurs at regular intervals along an amplitude “waveform”, in which “slow-change” occurs when Earth’s poles are “ice-free” AND ALSO when pack ice is about a mile deep over what is now Manhattan island.
So the reason a wise person may elect to “ignore” climate change is simply that despite
our presently being in the “rapid change” portion of Earth’s ice-age amplitude, the change occurs extremely slowly, relative to terrestrial life-spans, and will occur IRRESPECTIVE of humankind’s sensible near-term reliance upon fossil fuels.
Her most recent novel, entitled Unsheltered, was published in 2018 and follows two families in Vineland, New Jersey with one in the 1800s and the other in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.
Kingsolver is also a published poet and essayist. Two of her essay collections,
High Tide in Tucson (1995) and Small Wonder (2003), have been published, and
an anthology of her poetry was published in 1998 under the title Another America.
Her essay “Where to Begin” appears in the anthology Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting (2013), published by W. W. Norton & Company. Her prose poetry also accompanied photographs by Annie Griffiths Belt in a 2002 work titled Last Stand: America’s Virgin Lands.[25]
Her major non-fiction works include her 1990 publication Holding the Line:
Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983[26] and 2007’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a description of eating locally.[16] She has also been published as a science journalist in periodicals such as Economic Botany on topics such as desert plants and bioresources.[3][27]
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – Bing video
When Barbara and her family move from suburban Arizona to rural Appalachia,
they take on a new challenge: to spend a year on a locally-produced diet, paying close attention to the provenance of all they consume. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle follows the family through the first year of their experiment. They find themselves eager to move away from the typical food scenario of American families: a refrigerator packed with processed, factory-farmed foods transported long distances using nonrenewable fuels. In their search for another way to eat and live, they begin to recover what Kingsolver considers our nation’s lost appreciation for farms and the natural processes of food production.
Americans spend less of their income on food than has any culture in the history
of the world, but they pay dearly in other ways: losing the flavors, diversity, and creative food cultures of earlier times. The environmental costs are also high, and the nutritional sacrifice is undeniable: on our modern industrial food supply, Americans are now raising the first generation of children to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.
Part memoir and part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.
Barbara Kingsolver – Animal, Vegetable, Miracle Audiobook Free
(fulllengthaudiobooks.com)