Wine & Book Group Pick for October '07
With the harvest and Thanksgiving on everyone's mind, BookBuffet invites you to take a look at Barbara Kingsolver's nonfiction treatise Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
for this month's Wine & Book pick. It's about eating local, eating seasonal, supporting small farms, and saving the planet from extinction through your everyday purchasing choices of food that is not trucked, flown or shipped using fossil fuels to your market. Don't miss the opportunity to drink a lovely local wine along with this book when you meet to discuss it with your group. Women & Wine have lots of ideas on wine makers whose products are organic, too. Learn about wine as you read the wonderful titles selected especially for this group.
October 01, 2007 —
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About The Author
Barbara Kingsolver is one of America's strongest literary voices with a long list of novels and books that have won prizes and a place on book group lists as their favorite all-time author. Kingsolver was born in Annapolis, Maryland, but was raised near Carlisle, Kentucky, "in the middle of an alfalfa field ... between the opulent horse farms and the impoverished coal fields." [1] Her parents were medical and public-health workers who briefly embarked on an expedition to the Congo when Kingsolver was a child. Kingsolver describes her childhood as a rather solitary one, and used the time she spent by herself to stimulate an “elaborate life of the mind."
After starting university studying classical piano toward a music degree, Kingsolver switched to evolutionary biology and ecology, earning her Masters from the University of Arizona. She then took a job as a science writer for the university. The science writing led to some freelance feature writing and journalism. In 1986, she won an Arizona Press Club award for outstanding feature writing. Her first novel, The Bean Trees, was published in 1988.
Her subsequent books are listed below. The Poisonwood Bible (1998) was a bestseller that won the National Book Prize of South Africa, made finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner award, and was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection. In 2000, Barbara was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Bill Clinton.
In 1994, Kingsolver was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from her alma mater, DePauw University.
Barbara Kingsolver lives with her husband, Steven Hopp, their daughter, Lily, and her daughter, Camille, on a farm in Southwest Virginia.
Her Books
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, 2007, (with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver) Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, this book (released May 2007) tells the story of how our family was changed by one year of deliberately eating food produced in the place where we live. Barbara wrote the central narrative; Steven's sidebars dig deeper into various aspects of food-production science and industry; Camille's brief essays offer a nineteen-year-old's perspective on the local-food project, plus nutritional information, meal plans, and recipes.
The Bean Trees: A Novel
, 1988, 1st UK edition 1989, Limited edition (200) 1992
Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 (ILR Press Books)
Homeland and Other Stories
, 1989
Animal Dreams
, 1990
Another America, 1992
Pigs in Heaven
, 1993
High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never
, 1995, also: Limited edition (150)1995
The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel (P.S.)
, 1998
Prodigal Summer: A Novel
, 2000
Small Wonder: Essays
, 2002
Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands
, 2002 (with photographer Annie Griffiths Belt)
Women Wine Picks
Our partners at www.womenwine.com are brilliant at matching wines at three different price points for our books. Please click through to their website and you can purchase by the bottle or by the case and share with your book group when you discuss this book (with extra bottles added to your growing cellar.)
Previous Wine & Book Picks
August On Chesil Beach, set in England
July The Last Chinese Chef, set in Shanghai
June The Birth House, set in Nova Scotia
May Water for Elephants, set in Depression-era America
March-April Snowflower and the Secret Fan, set in China
February Cloudstreet, set in Perth, Australia
January The Good German, set in Berlin
December The Historian, set in Eastern Europe
November One Good Turn, set in Edinburgh
September Lost in the Forest, set in Napa Valley
August The Hummingbird's Daughter, set in Mexico
July The Devil Wears Prada, set in NYC
June Woolf in Ceylon, set in Ceylon
May Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living, Australia
April The Mermaid Chair, set in South Carolina
March Memoirs of a Geisha, set in Japan
February Get a Life, set in South Africa
January In the Shadow of the Wind, set in Barcelona
December Pride and Prejudice, set in England
November Beyond Measure, set in Renaissance Italy
October Breakfast at Tiffany's, set in New York
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