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


From Publishers Weekly
This book of essays by Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible, etc.) is like a visit from a cherished old friend. Conversation ranges from what Kingsolver ate on a trip to Japan to wonder over a news story about a she-bear who suckled a lost child to how it feels to be an American idealist living in a post-September 11 world. She tackles some sticky issues, among them the question of who is entitled to wave the American flag and why, and some possible reasons why our nation has been targeted for terror by angry fundamentalists and what we can do to ease our anxiety over the new reality while respecting the rest of planet Earth's inhabitants. Kingsolver has strong opinions, but has a gift for explaining what she thinks and how she arrived at her conclusions in a way that gives readers plenty of room to disagree comfortably. But Kingsolver's essays also reward her readers in other ways. As she puts it herself in "What Good Is a Story": "We are nothing if we can't respect our readers." Respect for the intelligence of her audience is apparent everywhere in this outstanding collection. Illus. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Don't be misled by the foreword and opening subject in novelist and essayist Kingsolver's new collection: this work is not all about our continuing anguish over September ll. Some of the essays do concern themselves with that fateful day and her reactions to it, but most are pieces on varied subjects written since her 1995 collection High Tide in Tucson. Some have been published before, like the three little gems Kingsolver co-wrote with her husband, Steven Hopp. The topics range from television to the homeless, Columbine to problems of writing about sex, poetry to the meaning of the flag. Throughout, Kingsolver seamlessly combines the personal and the political. Thus, an essay about her daughter Lily's chickens comments on world agriculture; watching a hummingbird build its nest becomes a springboard for informed and impassioned thinking about evolution and genetic engineering. Recommended for most collections in both academic and public libraries. Mary Paumier Jones, Westminster P.L., CO Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
Those familiar with Barbara Kingsolver's work are aware of her distinctive literary voice. In the audiobook version of her most recent collection of essays, listeners are also treated to her actual voice, and the result is pleasing. With beautiful language and heartbreaking turns of phrase, Kingsolver reflects on the world community and one's individual role in it. The author's actual voice is as thoughtful and quietly strong as her written voice, lending a certain calm to her thought-provoking commentary. Hearing a brilliant author read her own work is rewarding in this case. No matter what one thinks about Kingsolver's worldviews--she loves her country and sees its flaws as well--this audiobook is timely and interesting. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Cherished novelist Kingsolver, author most recently of Prodigal Summer (2000), trusts in the power of the parable, an ancient and noble form that she uses with great skill and wisdom in her first essay collection since High Tide in Tucson (1995). This set of 19 penetrating autobiographical musings on humankind and how we treat each other and the rest of nature coalesced in the stunned aftermath of September 11. Grief, the struggle for understanding, and the recognition of the need for "reordered expectations" underlie each bracing reverie. Trained as a biologist and gifted in the art of storytelling, Kingsolver is able to draw on her knowledge of the wild--of evolution and biodiversity--as well as her feel for archetypes to bring into focus and dramatize the biological and social impact of our unexamined habits of consumption. Food, motherhood, gardening, literature, television, homelessness, globalization, scientific illiteracy, selfishness, and forgiveness all come under sharp and revelatory scrutiny. As does love of country: "Americans who read and think are patriots of the first order." Amen. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Booklist
Essays … [of] great skill and wisdom.


San Francisco Chronicle
A delightful, challenging, and wonderfully informative book.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Barbara Kingsolver's essays move at an unrushed pace, but they grab you. Take, for example, the tender choreography of opening lines of "Letter To My Mother": "I imagine you putting on your glasses to read this letter. Oh, Lord, what now? You tilt your head back and hold the page away from you, with your left hand flat on your chest protecting your heart." Or the one paragraph teaser for "Stealing Apples": "I have never yet been able to say out loud that I am a poet." Like the pieces in her High Tide in Tucson, these essays stretch out in front of us with a leisure of a quiet, overdue conversation.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Book Magazine

Principally known as the author of such bestselling novels as The Bean Trees and The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver grew up shy and studious, got a degree in biology and currently divides her time between writing, raising two daughters and—with her husband, an ornithologist—working for conservation and humanitarian causes. She grows her own vegetables and for part of the year lives simply in a rural cabin with feeble electrical wiring, hummingbirds outside her kitchen window and a driveway half a mile long. We learn all this in Kingsolver's latest collection of essays, which reveals its author to possess many redeeming facets. Observant, imaginative, both lucid and impassioned, Kingsolver writes effectively about her family and the natural world. The personal essays make us feel we understand Kingsolver so well that it is a shame the essay "Small Wonder" comes first. This confused and rambling work is a meditation on two things that the author attempts to link: the bombing campaign after September 11, in Afghanistan, and the discovery of a lost child in Iran who, according to news service stories, had been kept alive by a female bear. Marked by sentimentality, the essay never really confronts how America should deal with enemies who would gladly destroy it. Kingsolver's suggested metaphorical alternative, lulling the enemy to sleep with an "elixir of contentment," is so vague and wishful that it's impossible to take seriously. A few of the entries in this collection make too-easy historical or political assumptions that amount to errors of fact. In "Small Wonder," for example, Kingsolver wrongly argues that the modern age is unique inhaving to envision problems of global dimensions. Even during the Black Death, Kingsolver asserts, "They couldn't imagine a wreckage so appalling as the end of humankind on a planet made squalid by man's own hand." There is plenty of historical evidence, however, that that is precisely what people did imagine, although the squalor was moral rather than ecological. Perhaps more alarming than the mistakes and lapses in logic are the arrogant ways Kingsolver occasionally asserts her intellectual rigor. "I've tossed aside stories because of botched Spanish or French phrases.... stopped reading books in which birds sang on the wrong continents or full moons appeared two weeks apart," she admits in "What Good Is a Story?", which provides criteria for what she thinks constitutes good writing. One can't help but wonder if the author ever stopped to consider how this sort of finger-pointing might impact her own credibility. In spite of the book's annoying flaws, there is still plenty here to admire and enjoy. The essays that focus on Kingsolver's family and the natural world, effortlessly linking daily matters to global issues, are altogether marvelous. In "Lily's Chickens," she describes the small flock of hens, bought to please her five-year-old daughter, Lily, and kept in line by Mr. Doodle, a rooster whose absurd machismo becomes endearing. Lily tends the hens, feeds them and proudly carries the first egg into the kitchen, shouting, "Attention everybody, I have an announcement: FREE BREAKFAST." Meanwhile, Kingsolver describes the benefits of raising food locally, pointing out that the average supermarket food item travels 1,300 miles—an avoidable waste of natural resources. In every case, she is on the side of nature and the preservation of its diversity, whether explaining, in "A Fist in the Eye of God," exactly why genetic engineering poses a terrible long-term risk, or exploring, in "The One-Eyed Monster, and Why I Don't Let Him In," the disastrous limitations of television. "The world, a much wider place than seventeen inches, includes songbird migration, emphysema, pollinating insects, the Krebs cycle ... and a trillion other things outside the notice of CNN," Kingsolver reminds us. In some essays, the tone is more scientific than personal; in others, such as the wonderful "Letter to My Mother," the tone is intimate without being oppressively close. While far from perfect, this book expresses the misgivings and despair experienced by many of us, and counters our shared sense of loss with the treasures of a quiet life. It is fascinating that in her essay on what makes a story valuable, Kingsolver never mentions the companionship of a narrative voice—fallible but intimate—when such a voice is her greatest strength. —Penelope Mesic

Publishers Weekly

This book of essays by Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible, etc.) is like a visit from a cherished old friend. Conversation ranges from what Kingsolver ate on a trip to Japan to wonder over a news story about a she-bear who suckled a lost child to how it feels to be an American idealist living in a post-September 11 world. She tackles some sticky issues, among them the question of who is entitled to wave the American flag and why, and some possible reasons why our nation has been targeted for terror by angry fundamentalists and what we can do to ease our anxiety over the new reality while respecting the rest of planet Earth's inhabitants. Kingsolver has strong opinions, but has a gift for explaining what she thinks and how she arrived at her conclusions in a way that gives readers plenty of room to disagree comfortably. But Kingsolver's essays also reward her readers in other ways. As she puts it herself in "What Good Is a Story": "We are nothing if we can't respect our readers." Respect for the intelligence of her audience is apparent everywhere in this outstanding collection. Illus. (Apr. 20) Forecast: Kingsolver's name means bestseller potential, possibly aided by the possibility of revisiting the controversy she has aroused with her response to September 11. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

This collection of 23 essays covers topics both global and personal, ranging from September 11 to Kingsolver's vegetable garden. A few have been previously published in natural history magazines and newspapers, but most debut here. A biology and ecology major and former scientific writer and journalist, Kingsolver is a one-woman soiree, presenting well-wrought scientific views about Darwinian theory and genetic engineering alongside personal narratives that deliver universal homilies-watching television, a date rape, and her daughter and her mother. There could be no better reader for these vignettes than the author herself; her Kentucky lilt adds intimacy to the discourse, as if she were a friend chatting over a cup of tea. This gentle, intelligent gadfly will provide intellectual stimulation, whether or not the listener agrees with her positions. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries.-Judith Robinson, Univ. at Buffalo, NY Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews