Download or read book Summary of Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L Hopp and Camille Kingsolver written by QuickRead and published by QuickRead.com. This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One family’s story of living off the land. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (2007) is the story of one family’s year of experimental eating. By moving to the countryside and living solely off of what they raised and harvested, the authors embarked on a remarkable and deeply personal journey that forever changed their relationship with food, gardening, and family. Do you want more free book summaries like this? Download our app for free at https://www.QuickRead.com/App and get access to hundreds of free book and audiobook summaries. DISCLAIMER: This book summary is meant as a summary and an analysis and not a replacement for the original work. If you like this summary please consider purchasing the original book to get the full experience as the original author intended it to be. If you are the original author of any book published on QuickRead and want us to remove it, please contact us at [email protected].

Download or read book Animal Vegetable Miracle written by Barbara Kingsolver and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver returns with her first nonfiction narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat. "As the U.S. population made an unprecedented mad dash for the Sun Belt, one carload of us paddled against the tide, heading for the Promised Land where water falls from the sky and green stuff grows all around. We were about to begin the adventure of realigning our lives with our food chain. "Naturally, our first stop was to buy junk food and fossil fuel. . . ." Hang on for the ride: With characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that's better for the neighborhood and also better on the table. Part memoir, 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. "This is the story of a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew . . . and of how our family was changed by our first year of deliberately eating food produced from the same place where we worked, went to school, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air." Includes an excerpt from Flight Behavior.

Download or read book Animal Vegetable Miracle written by Barbara Kingsolver and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2007-05-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver returns with her first nonfiction narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat. "As the U.S. population made an unprecedented mad dash for the Sun Belt, one carload of us paddled against the tide, heading for the Promised Land where water falls from the sky and green stuff grows all around. We were about to begin the adventure of realigning our lives with our food chain. "Naturally, our first stop was to buy junk food and fossil fuel. . . ." Hang on for the ride: With characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that's better for the neighborhood and also better on the table. Part memoir, 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. "This is the story of a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew . . . and of how our family was changed by our first year of deliberately eating food produced from the same place where we worked, went to school, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air."

Download or read book Animal Dreams written by Barbara Kingsolver and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An emotional masterpiece . . . A novel in which humor, passion, and superb prose conspire to seize a reader by the heart and by the soul.” —New York Daily News From Barbara Kingsolver, the acclaimed author of Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, The Bean Trees, and other modern classics, Animal Dreams is a passionate and complex novel about love, forgiveness, and one woman’s struggle to find her place in the world "Animals dream about the things they do in the daytime just like people do. If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life." So says Loyd Peregrina, a handsome Apache trainman and latter-day philosopher. But when Codi Noline returns to her hometown, Loyd's advice is painfully out of her reach. Dreamless and at the end of her rope, Codi comes back to Grace, Arizona, to confront her past and face her ailing, distant father. What she finds is a town threatened by a silent environmental catastrophe, some startling clues to her own identity, and a man whose view of the world could change the course of her life. Blending flashbacks, dreams, and Native American legends, Animal Dreams is a suspenseful love story and a moving exploration of life's largest commitments. This edition includes a P.S. section with additional insights from Barbara Kingsolver, background material, suggestions for further reading, and more.

Download or read book The Generals written by Thomas E. Ricks and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-10-29 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times bestseller! An epic history of the decline of American military leadership—from the bestselling author of Fiasco and Churchill and Orwell. While history has been kind to the American generals of World War II—Marshall, Eisenhower, Patton, and Bradley—it has been less kind to the generals of the wars that followed, such as Koster, Franks, Sanchez, and Petraeus. In The Generals, Thomas E. Ricks sets out to explain why that is. In chronicling the widening gulf between performance and accountability among the top brass of the U.S. military, Ricks tells the stories of great leaders and suspect ones, generals who rose to the occasion and generals who failed themselves and their soldiers. In Ricks’s hands, this story resounds with larger meaning: about the transmission of values, about strategic thinking, and about the difference between an organization that learns and one that fails.

Download or read book Aftershock written by David Wiedemer and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-07-07 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A practical guide to preparing for the next phase of the financial meltdown From the authors who were the first to predict Phase I of our current economic downturn-in their landmark 2006 book, America's Bubble Economy-comes their insightful sequel discussing their predictions for the next phase of the Bubble Economy. It may seem like the worst has come and gone, but it hasn't. With their proven track record of accurate predictions-which most financial professionals and economists missed-the authors explain how and why the next phase of the financial meltdown is about to hit. Things are not going back to how they were before. Instead, we are moving through uncharted territory, with new challenges and opportunities that few people can anticipate. Written in a straightforward and accessible style, Aftershock shows readers how to seek safety and profits in these dynamic economic conditions. Discusses how to protect assets, businesses, and jobs before and during the second wave of financial meltdown Provides clear and accurate advice on how to profit from the collapsing bubbles Offer focused guidance regarding real estate, which will continue to be a pressing concern for many The authors' first book was chosen by Kiplinger's as one of the 30 Best Business Books of 2006, and its accuracy has been hailed by Paul Farrell of Dow Jones MarketWatch when he said "America's Bubble Economy's Predictions, though ignored, were accurate." Don't miss out on these time tested author's proven advice for how to mange your money during the coming financial meltdown.

Download or read book Pigs in Heaven written by Barbara Kingsolver and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Picking up where her modern classic The Bean Trees left off, Barbara Kingsolver’s bestselling Pigs in Heaven continues the tale of Turtle and Taylor Greer, a Native American girl and her adoptive mother who have settled in Tucson, Arizona, as they both try to overcome their difficult pasts. Taking place three years after The Bean Trees, Taylor is now dating a musician named Jax and has officially adopted Turtle. But when a lawyer for the Cherokee Nation begins to investigate the adoption—their new life together begins to crumble. Depicting the clash between fierce family love and tribal law, poverty and means, abandonment and belonging, Pigs in Heaven is a morally wrenching, gently humorous work of fiction that speaks equally to the head and the heart. This edition includes a P.S. section with additional insights from Barbara Kingsolver, background material, suggestions for further reading, and more.

Download or read book The Lacuna written by Barbara Kingsolver and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2009-11-05 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **NOW INCLUDING THE FIRST CHAPTER OF DEMON COPPERHEAD** TWICE WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION FROM THE WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION THE MULTI-MILLION COPY BESTSELLING AUTHOR 'Lush.' Sunday Times 'Superb.' Daily Mail 'Elegantly written.' Sunday Telegraph From award-winning and internationally bestselling author of Demon Copperhead and Flight Behaviour, The Lacuna is the heartbreaking story of a man torn between the warm heart of Mexico and the cold embrace of 1950s America in the shadow of Senator McCarthy. Born in America and raised in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is a liability to his social-climbing flapper mother, Salome. When he starts work in the household of Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo - where the Bolshevik leader, Lev Trotsky, is also being harboured as a political exile - he inadvertently casts his lot with art, communism and revolution. A compulsive diarist, he records and relates his colourful experiences of life with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Trotsky in the midst of the Mexican revolution. A violent upheaval sends him back to America; but political winds continue to throw him between north and south, in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach - the lacuna - between truth and public presumption.

Download or read book High Tide in Tucson written by Barbara Kingsolver and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Clever. . . magical. . . beautifully crafted. Kingsolver spins you around the philosophic world a dozen times." — Milwaukee Sentinel "There is no one quite like Barbara Kingsolver in contemporary literature," raves the Washington Post Book World, and it is right. Kingsolver's critically acclaimed writings always entertain and touch her legions of loyal fans. In High Tide in Tucson, she returns to her familiar themes of family, community, the common good, and the natural world. The title essay considers Buster, a hermit crab that accidentally stows away on Kingsolver's return trip from the Bahamas to her desert home, and turns out to have manic-depressive tendencies. Buster is running around for all he's worth—one can only presume it's high tide in Tucson. Kingsolver brings a moral vision and refreshing sense of humor to subjects ranging from modern motherhood to the history of private property to the suspended citizenship of human beings in the Animal Kingdom. Beautifully packaged, with original illustrations by illustrator Paul Mirocha, these wise lessons on the urgent business of being alive make it a perfect gift for Kingsolver's many fans.

Download or read book The Poisonwood Bible written by Barbara Kingsolver and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller • Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • An Oprah's Book Club Selection “Powerful . . . [Kingsolver] has with infinitely steady hands worked the prickly threads of religion, politics, race, sin and redemption into a thing of terrible beauty.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review The Poisonwood Bible, now celebrating its 25th anniversary, established Barbara Kingsolver as one of the most thoughtful and daring of modern writers. Taking its place alongside the classic works of postcolonial literature, it is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in Africa. The story is told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Against this backdrop, Orleanna Price reconstructs the story of her evangelist husband's part in the Western assault on Africa, a tale indelibly darkened by her own losses and unanswerable questions about her own culpability. Also narrating the story, by turns, are her four daughters—the teenaged Rachel; adolescent twins Leah and Adah; and Ruth May, a prescient five-year-old. These sharply observant girls, who arrive in the Congo with racial preconceptions forged in 1950s Georgia, will be marked in surprisingly different ways by their father's intractable mission, and by Africa itself. Ultimately each must strike her own separate path to salvation. Their passionately intertwined stories become a compelling exploration of moral risk and personal responsibility.

Download or read book Small Wonder written by Barbara Kingsolver and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In twenty-two wonderfully articulate essays, Barbara Kingsolver raises her voice in praise of nature, family, literature, and the joys of everyday life while examining the genesis of war, violence, and poverty in our world From the author of High Tide in Tucson, comes Small Wonder, a new collection of essays that begins with a parable gleaned from recent news: villagers search for a missing infant boy and find him, unharmed, in the cave of a dangerous bear that has mothered him like one of her own. Clearly, our understanding of evil needs to be revised. What we fear most can save us. From this tale, Barbara Kingsolver goes on to consider the chasm between the privileged and the poor, which she sees as the root cause of violence and war in our time. She writes about her attachment to the land, to nature and wilderness, trees and mountains-the place from which she tells her stories. Whether worrying about the dangers of genetically engineered food crops, or creating opportunities for children to feel useful and competent - like growing food for the family’s table - Kingsolver looks for small wonders, where they grow, and celebrates them.

Download or read book Rooted in the Earth written by Dianne D. Glave and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2010-08 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a basis in environmental history, this groundbreaking study challenges the idea that a meaningful attachment to nature and the outdoors is contrary to the black experience. The discussion shows that contemporary African American culture is usually seen as an urban culture, one that arose out of the Great Migration and has contributed to international trends in fashion, music, and the arts ever since. However, because of this urban focus, many African Americans are not at peace with their rich but tangled agrarian legacy. On one hand, the book shows, nature and violence are connected in black memory, especially in disturbing images such as slave ships on the ocean, exhaustion in the fields, dogs in the woods, and dead bodies hanging from trees. In contrast, though, there is also a competing tradition of African American stewardship of the land that should be better known. Emphasizing the tradition of black environmentalism and using storytelling techniques to dramatize the work of black naturalists, this account corrects the record and urges interested urban dwellers to get back to the land.

Download or read book The End of Big written by Nicco Mele and published by Picador. This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Governments fear—and sometimes fall before—individuals relying only on social media. Major political parties see their power eroded by grassroots forces through online fund-raising. Universities scramble to preserve their student populations in the face of less expensive, more accessible online courses. Print and broadcast news outlets struggle to compete with citizen journalists and bloggers. Is it the end of big? Social media pioneer, political and business strategist, and Harvard Kennedy School faculty member Nicco Mele offers a fascinating, sometimes frightening look at how our ability to stay connected—constantly, instantly, and globally—is dramatically changing our world. As our traditional institutions are being disrupted in revolutionary ways, we risk a dark and wildly unstable future, one in which our freedoms and basic human values could be destroyed rather than enhanced. Both hopeful and alarming, The End of Big is a thought-provoking, passionately argued book that offers genuine insight into the ways we are using technology, and how it is radically changing our world in ways we are only now beginning to understand.

Download or read book Holding the Line written by Barbara Kingsolver and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-26 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Holding the Line, Barbara Kingsolver's first non-fiction book, is the story of women's lives transformed by an a signal event. Set in the small mining towns of Arizona, it is part oral history and part social criticism, exploring the process of empowerment which occurs when people work together as a community. Like Kingsolver's award-winning novels, Holding the Line is a beautifully written book grounded on the strength of its characters. Hundreds of families held the line in the 1983 strike against Phelps Dodge Copper in Arizona. After more than a year the strikers lost their union certification, but the battle permanently altered the social order in these small, predominantly Hispanic mining towns. At the time the strike began, many women said they couldn't leave the house without their husband's permission. Yet, when injunctions barred union men from picketing, their wives and daughters turned out for the daily picket lines. When the strike dragged on and men left to seek jobs elsewhere, women continued to picket, organize support, and defend their rights even when the towns were occupied by the National Guard. "Nothing can ever be the same as it was before," said Diane McCormick of the Morenci Miners Women's Auxiliary. "Look at us. At the beginning of this strike, we were just a bunch of ladies."

Download or read book Locally Laid written by Lucie B. Amundsen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How a Midwestern family with no agriculture experience went from a few backyard chickens to a full-fledged farm—and discovered why local chicks are better. When Lucie Amundsen had a rare night out with her husband, she never imagined what he’d tell her over dinner—that his dream was to quit his office job (with benefits!) and start a commercial-scale pasture-raised egg farm. His entire agricultural experience consisted of raising five backyard hens, none of whom had yet laid a single egg. To create this pastured poultry ranch, the couple scrambles to acquire nearly two thousand chickens—all named Lola. These hens, purchased commercially, arrive bereft of basic chicken-y instincts, such as the evening urge to roost. The newbie farmers also deal with their own shortcomings, making for a failed inspection and intense struggles to keep livestock alive (much less laying) during a brutal winter. But with a heavy dose of humor, they learn to negotiate the highly stressed no-man’s-land known as Middle Agriculture. Amundsen sees firsthand how these midsized farms, situated between small-scale operations and mammoth factory farms, are vital to rebuilding America’s local food system. With an unexpected passion for this dubious enterprise, Amundsen shares a messy, wry, and entirely educational story of the unforeseen payoffs (and frequent pitfalls) of one couple’s ag adventure—and many, many hours spent wrangling chickens.

Download or read book The Bean Trees written by Barbara Kingsolver and published by Paw Prints. This book was released on 2008-10-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Young, bright Taylor Greer leaves her poverty-stricken life in Kentucky and heads west, picking up an abandoned Native American baby girl whom she names Turtle and finds a new home in Tucson with Mattie, an old woman who takes in Central American refugees

Download or read book Hillbilly Elegy written by J. D. Vance and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER IS NOW A MAJOR-MOTION PICTURE DIRECTED BY RON HOWARD AND STARRING AMY ADAMS, GLENN CLOSE, AND GABRIEL BASSO "You will not read a more important book about America this year."—The Economist "A riveting book."—The Wall Street Journal "Essential reading."—David Brooks, New York Times Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.