Books & Music...

Barbara Kingsolver's works of fiction do much to inspire the reader's imagination and provoke contemplative thought regarding heady subject matters. She makes you feel deeply and seeks to help you understand the protagonist's plight in each story. In her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Kingsolver finds herself in the middle of a moral delimma, which she responds to by moving from Arizona to Virginia to grow their own food and live off their 20-acre family farm.

With Kingsolver's resume of best-selling books, she could very easily choose to live however she pleased. But with the same conviction she writes with regarding deep questions in life, she demonstrates in this book that there's plenty of substance to her style.

Check out this green nugget from her book explaining her family's reason for moving:

"The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations. True fact. Fossil fuels were consumed for the food's transport, refrigeration, and processing, with the obvious environmental consequences. The option of getting our household's food from close to home, in Tucson, seemed no better to us. The Sonoran desert historically offered to humans baked dirt as a construction material, and for eats, a corn-and-beans diet organized around late summer monsoons, garnished in spring with cactus fruits and wild tubers. The Hohokam and Pima were the last people to live on that land without creating an environmental overdraft. When the Spaniards arrived, they didn't rush to take up the Hohokam diet craze. Instead they set about working up a monumental debt: planting orange trees and alfalfa, digging wells for irrigation, withdrawing millions more gallons from the water table each year than a dozen inches of annual rainfall could ever restore. Arizona is still an agricultural state. Even after the population boom of the mid-nineties, 85 percent of the state's water still went to thirsty crops like cotton, alfalfa, citrus and pecan trees. Mild winters offer the opportunity to create an artificial endless summer, as long as we can conjure up water and sustain a chemically induced illusion of topsoil."