Small Wonder: Essays

In the beautiful language and description readers have come to expect from Barbara Kingsolver, she addresses in this collection of essays her concerns for society and the environment. The book reminded me of how crucial these issues are and simple ways that I can lead my life that will work towards a solution to the problems, rather than being a contributor. I've bought several copies for gifts because a book this wonderful begs to be shared.

The themes of the book are truly important and the opinions expressed are compelling, but from the first chapter onward I found the writing to be marred by a preachy and self-congratulatory tone and a tendency for the author to inject herself intrusively into otherwise fascinating narratives. (Ms. Kingsolver occasionally seemed to recognize the preachiness, but only to deny it explicitly.) I would highly recommend this book for its content, but as the first example I've read of Ms. Kingsolver's writing, it leaves me with no desire for further acquaintance with her work.

If you're looking for the incredible fiction of Barbara Kingsolver, this isn't the book. This collection of essays, though, is as insightful, detailed, and passionate as her fiction. Essay lovers will rejoice, and fiction fans will discover Kingsolver's "other voice."

I found Barbara Kingsolver's "A Small Wonder" inspirational. It's the first time I've finished a book and immediately turned it over and read it again! Ms. Kingsolver is a perceptive storyteller and the way she portrays everyday experiences sheds an illuminating perspective on a better way to experience life - from how we use resources, to how we raise our kids, to how we relate to others. It's a wonderful guidebook for those who are concerned about peace, family and the environment. Everyone should read it because we should all be concerned about these things!

I enjoyed this because of her compassionate insights into our crazy world, and the greed that seems to drive much of what is done. I also am from the southwest, Tucson actually, so I love hearing her descriptions of the area. She loses me on some things, but I greatly admire her talents and knowledge of her subject matter.

Barbara Kingsolver does it again. She manages to write beautiful, heartbreaking, and sometimes funny essays on her daughter raising chickens, biology, growing her own food, writing a "sexy" novel, the demise of independent bookstores, and the heartbreak of September 11th. You might not always agree with Ms. Kingsolver, but by God, you'll be glad she's around to tell her truth.

Barbara has done it again with a great collection of essays, each dealing with the natural world. Her experiences shine through with so many ways for people to have a better life, but also to contribute to overcoming problems that we face today. This work of non-fiction is outstanding and one of the best books I read this year, already. If you haven't read her novels, you will be delighted.

This is a thoughtful book that covers many political and emotional issues that effect us all. The beginning and end are political in nature and the middle concerns itself with our moral values and judgements. This is a Must Read for all American's claiming to want peace in this world. She insists that the change starts at home and in our local community. This book is for anyone who feels they are an American patriot and asks us to review that commitment and live up to a new challenge, that actions speak louder than words.

What a good book. Barbara Kingsolver is such a wonderful writer. She is thoughtful, so intelligent and insightful. I learned alot from this book. I've read The Poisonwood Bible and Prodigal Summer and thoroughly loved both of them. She is fast becoming one of my favorite authors. I will be buying this book for gifts. I think anyone who wants to read to learn or for entertainment, will love this book. What a mind she has. I'm overwhelmed by her ability to move me, and to make me think more deeply about the world in which we live.

That Kingsolver is a skilled and gifted writer is not in question. But using the debacle of the September 11, 2001 attack as a foundation for her rambling thoughts puts the entire book in the realm of wishful and naive thinking, as all the assumptions about who, how and why that she continuously offers stem from the official narrative and its many fallacies. If only she could be as critical as she is artful, the overall reading experience would not be quite so saccharine.

I love the way Barbara Kingslover writes. Not only does she often open my mind but my heart as well. In fact, she cracks open the shell around my heart and leaves it bear and open to feel again. After September 11th I found I had no words to express my fears, saddness and my hope for the future
of our country and for our world, but she found that way and through her essays she left a trail of white stones in the forest for me to follow. For that I am deeply thankful.

I love all her writing and especially love this book. She says things that really need to be said far more frequently and much, much more loudly. People who are having problems with these essays may need to look a little deeper at why that might be. Noone may be able able to say something exactly as one would wish, and it's awfully easy to be nit-picky but the fact remains, and there's just no two ways about it, the world would be a far better place if we were all a little more like her.

These are very inspiring essays by one of our most brilliant writers. If you have enjoyed her fiction, you will really like her voice (literally, as she reads her essays aloud)as an observer of our human condition on this planet. There is a particularly great take on the 911 catastrophe.

Barbara Kingsolver may well be the Rachel Carson of this generation. Her deep concern for our country and the world are based on sound scientific knowledge and deep personal commitment. She treads lightly, loves greatly, and writes beautifully. We are fortunate to have her at this critical time.

Without being to preachy, Ms. Kingsolver discusses some of the worlds problems, all the while throwing in personal stories of the people and places she loves. She offers her beliefs and commentary in an honest and genuine way. She is truly inspirational, and this is my favorite of her books. This book will not disappoint you!

I bought the audio tapes and listened to them during long commutes. Barbara Kingsolver certainly does make us think about the tough issues, however, I found myself debating with her throughout the entire series of essays. At one point she tells us how many hundreds of miles some kind of food product takes to get to our table, how much fuel is consumed, while in another essay she brags about how many THOUSANDS of sky miles her 'home grown' fit body has flown to study exotic birds. She wants us to believe that she scorns a consumer lifestyle while she sells millions of books and maintains two homes on opposite ends of the USA. Oh, by the way Barbara, do you walk between your two homes in order to save fuel? I'm glad that you have two great daughters who are concerned about the future of our planet, but I'm too busy maiking sure my teenager doesn't do drugs, or other harmful worldly behaviours that we haven't talked much about sea creatures that might become extinct after millions of years. Barbara says that the only people who criticize her are those who haven't read her works...sorry Barbara, I have read them all, but I'm done now!

Kingsolver, an extraordinary writer that I usually admire, has fallen with this set of essays. She has taken advantage of her bestselling author role to promote her political views. While it is certainly her right and her freedom that America has bought her to state those views, she would do better to stick to subjects other than political. Many people buy her books because they expect quality from her, not to read her views on living in America today. How quickly her editors and publishers jumped to get a book that was started on September 11, 2001 to the bookstores in April 2002! It says that anything with Barbara Kingsolver on the cover can and will be printed and sold.
She says in one our her essays that she is distressed when her daughter comes home from school and announces that the next day they are to wear red, white and blue in honor of the victims of September 11. Kingsolver would rather them wear black rather than patriotic gear. Why? Why honor a country that is dishonest and murderous is her theory. She also suggests cutting up the uniforms of dead soldiers to make a flag rather than the current one so that the nation knows how the ease that we live in in this country was bought. I suggest that Ms. Kingsolver take her lofty ideas with her to Afghanistan perhaps, and live in idealistic freedom there. This will keep her from being angry at the kind of price that is paid for her to live as she does here.

Read this book only if you enjoy hypocricy
This book reads much like an expanded version of "what I did on my summer vacation," not the "surprising and hopeful" stories I was promised. Depending on your disposition, you will either find Ms. Kingsolver amusingly naïve or downright annoying for her simpleton solutions to world problems, as well as her hypocrisy. If you have the misfortune to be listening to the audio version of this book, you will also get to "enjoy" her Forest Gump draw. She will attempt to present herself as a person who enjoys only the simple pleasures of life and conservative of natural resources. She then goes on to discuss her multiple homes and trips to South America, Japan, Mexico, etc. She states that rain forests should be protected while tramping through one. Most appallingly, she blames the terrorist actions on 9-11-01 on the United States!! She feels that by not giving enough to poor countries, we bring terrorism on ourselves. She chooses not to mention that the U.S. is one of the largest donators of aid to poor countries and only insults her own country for not giving a large enough percentage of its per capita income. Her solution is to give more and "bring down the walls" around the U.S. As a wealthy person herself, one must ask home much Ms. Kingsolver gives to the poor and whether she had "brought down the walls" around her home and invited the homeless to live with her. Her idea of a response to the terrorists' acts is to remain silent. One has to wonder if that would be her solution if a relative of hers had been murdered on 9-11 or if she had the understanding to foresee that the attacks would continue without action on the part of the U.S. Throughout the book, we are constantly told that there is an alternative to our current was, however, not ONCE is a workable alternative suggested.
In one story Ms. Kingsolver actually states that she would have liked to live Europe, but chose to move back to the U.S., in essence to straighten us out. I for one would like to say, please, Ms. Kingsolver, move back to Europe! Also, as a note to her: while she claims to be raising her children in the most "perfect" way, without tv (apparently a great sin to watch!), she had a 3 year old who stated that she wishes she was never born. Here's a tip - any child that young with a death wish needs a therapist, not to mention a more responsible parent. This book left me both angry at Ms. Kingsolver for her holier-than-thou hypocrisy, as well as sad for her pathetic inability to grasp the world issues that she attempts to tackle.

Barbara Kingsolver is clearly knowledgeable about biology, as she reminds us in one of her essays, and about the subject matter on which she writes in this book. But her holier-than-thou attitude and numerous contradictions in these essays were just too obvious to overlook. And actually, they are not that entertaining to read.

In almost all of them, she uses the term "we" when describing all the bad things "other people" do to the environment, but is quick to follow it up with "but I do this...," thus showing she is the perfect steward of the land. There's no way we can live up to all that perfection.

She says she turns down 90% of speaking engagements to avoid wasting all the jet fuel "we" egregiously waste every year. Yet many of her essays were written from exotic places, like Sanibel Island, Yucatan Peninsula, Guatemala, Cost Rica, Hawaii. And she travels twice-yearly between her Arizona and Virginia homes. I'm thinking it may have taken some fuel to get there.

She talks about how she does not approve of harming living things - yet she and her husband, unable to shoo hundreds of scarlet crabs out of the roadway in Costa Rica, drive right over them in a jeep ("Seeing Scarlet"). In a feeble attempt at humor, she mentions how "crunchy" the ride was.

She says she does not allow TV in her house ("The One-Eyed Monster and Why I Don't Let Him In"), but she allows her daughters to watch videos that she has carefully chosen for them. Pardon me, but don't you need a TV to plug the VCR thingy into in order to watch those videos?

In "A Letter to My Mother," she apologises for all her vehement arguments with her mother as a young girl - her mother insisted she was pretty, and Barbara disagreed with her back then. But now, she is sorry about those arguments, because she realizes that she was, in fact, pretty. And my mother and I argued over cleaning my room.

I read all of them thinking that eventually they would get better, but I am sorry to say they did not.

The essays reek of privilege (her homes, her vacations, her working from home), of vanity (I'm pretty!; I'm so smart that my friends ask me about genetic engineering over coffee!), of boastfulness (For years, I've grown much of what my family eats; I never allow my girls to watch TV; I don't eat fruits and vegetables out of season). Now all we need to do to be as good as she is is to figure out a way to acquire as much money as she has so we can afford to be so obsequiously conscientious. If she could have just acknowledged that her best-selling career has made it easy for her to be so choosy, she might have been more palatable. As it is, I got a picture of a truly annoying, self-important snob, and I plan to never read another thing she writes, ever again.

Who does she think she is? Preaching about how this is wrong, that is a waste, we are all just terrible because we watch TV and drive cars. Of course the author herself drives a ten-year-old car, so she is earth-friendly, right? WRONG. Ten years ago, cars polluted far more than the cars of today. Emissions have been refined since then and I feel it's just shocking and wrong for her to moan and complain as she does while she drives from one book signing to the next in her ten-year-old whatever it is that is chewing away the ozone layer with every mile. And excuse me? But the rest of us aren't flying around the country constantly, promoting our books. And do you think this book was printed on recycled paper with vegetable ink? I think not. As if this is not bad enough, the author claims to have begun writing this book September 12...how could she??? I mean, the whole nation was in shock, in horror, and here was this best-selling author sitting down at her computer to write, what she certainly must have known, would be another best-selling book??? I think she's just horrid. I'l never read her again. I'm going to take my book back to the bookstore and many of my friends feel the same way!

This book was required reading for my advanced placement english class. I consider myself a lover of the written word. I dream of someday becoming a novelist, or at least an english teacher. It usually takes me 3-5 days to finish a book, especially a good book. It has taken me 2 months to read this book. It is not only boring, but often times repetetive. Barbara Kingsolver relates everything to September 11th. Granted, this was a tragic day for our country and should always be remembered. But I dont see why Ms. Kingsolver found it necessary to write a whole novel about it. I find even less necessary for this to be required reading. Every once in a while Ms. Kingsolver finds the need to express herself with words that are a little more complicated than need be. It was a less than pleasent read and I wouldnt recommend it to my worst enemy.