Small Wonder
Essays
By Barbara Kingsolver
(HarperCollins, Hardcover, 9780060504076, 288pp.)
Publication Date: May 2002
Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook, Paperback
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In her new essay collection, the beloved author of High Tide in Tucson brings to us out of 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.
Barbara Kingsolver is the author of seven works of fiction, including the novels The Poisonwood Bible, Animal Dreams, and The Bean Trees, as well as books of poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction such as Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. In 2000, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country's highest honor for service through the arts. She lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia.
“Kingsolver possesses a rare depth of understanding of nature’s complex mechanisms.”
-San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
“This book of essays by Barbara Kingsolver is like a visit from a cherished old friend.”
-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A delightful, challenging, and wonderfully informative book.”
-San Francisco Chronicle
“Essays … [of] great skill and wisdom.”
-Booklist
“Observant, imaginative, and both lucid and impassioned.”
-Book Magazine
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