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Animal, Vegetable, Miracle  By  cover art

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

By: Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp
Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp
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Publisher's summary

When Barbara Kingsolver and her family move from suburban Arizona to rural Appalachia, they take on a new challenge: to spend a year on a locally-produced diet, paying close attention to the provenance of all they consume.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle follows the family through the first year of their experiment. They find themselves eager to move away from the typical food scenario of American families: a refrigerator packed with processed, factory-farmed foods transported long distances using nonrenewable fuels. In their search for another way to eat and live, they begin to recover what Kingsolver considers our nation's lost appreciation for farms and the natural processes of food production. Americans spend less of their income on food than has any culture in the history of the world, but they pay dearly in other ways: losing the flavors, diversity, and creative food cultures of earlier times. The environmental costs are also high, and the nutritional sacrifice is undeniable: on our modern industrial food supply, Americans are now raising the first generation of children to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.

Part memoir and 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.

©2007 Barbara Kingsolver (P)2007 HarperCollins Publishers

Critic reviews

"Kingsolver has the ear of a journalist and the accuracy of a naturalist." (Publishers Weekly)

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What listeners say about Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Good, but too long

There's an old church joke that's been told for years that goes something like this: A man dies and goes to heaven and is receiving a welcoming tour on his first day. He's shown a variety of rooms, each of which belongs to a particular denomination and in which those particular people are doing whatever is common to their little sect of Christianity. The denomination at the butt of the joke changes with who's telling it, but the last room is always occupied by that denomination and the angel says "Shhh, that's the So-and-so's. They think they're the only ones here." And the angel and the man tip-toe by.

Kingsolver writes a good book of course, but she's like the denomination that thinks they're the only ones present on the issue. Left wing types have bought into their own hype that they're the only ones trying to save the planet and the right wing types are all at Walmart buying Roundup.

A little less smugness and a more generous spirit would help her influence a greater number of people. Joel Salatin is on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum and he's arguably one of the most influential people on the scene today for making a real difference. Kingsolver is a great writer but maybe she should hire Salatin to edit her next book if she decides to produce a sequel.

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6 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • S
  • 05-06-09

Hard to get through

I read In Defense of Food in about a day, but this is really hard to get through. There is so much detail- about everything. I'm not a hard-core farmer, just a gardener looking for some gems of information for my little yard. She goes into such detail about every little thing that it makes me wonder if it would go quicker as a 'read' rather than a listen, or if I should have looked for an abridged version first.

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5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Wonderful

I live in Northern New Hampshire on a working farm where we raise all our own meat..some of our vegetables and all of our eggs and milk. I could indentify with many of the tasks and experiences of the Kingsolver/Hoppe family. I enjoyed every minute of the book and re-listened several times while weeding, cleaning etc. I have recommended it to many of my friends...two of whom (In CT and NM) had purchased the print copy in early May and enjoyed it as well.

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5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

informative and relaxing

Kingsolver provided a good overview of the challenges and pleasures of trying to live a contemporary life "off the land." Beyond helping us understand the dynamics of "eating local," she, her husband and daughter shared informative and interesting insights on a range of issues related to eating. Finally, Kingsolver narrated most of the book, and it was like listening to a kind aunt reading to you.

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5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars

Good for a city slicker

Barbara Kingsolver does know how to tell a good story. She manages to turn what can be a very boring topic and makes it relatively interesting. For anyone who hasn't grown a large garden, eaten their own food, or know why asparagus isn't available in August, then this is a good book. She talks about why, when and how food is grown.

In the vein of making a good story she also anthromorphize all animals and plants. For example, the end story turns a large part on turkeys she is raising. Having raised the exact breed of turkeys she does perhaps gave me a little more insight. Her story is cute, but they aren't people. Applying human attributes to turkeys, or any animal, is annoying and not very helpful. They will squat or want to mate with a towel on a stick.

You also have to be careful. She wants to return her turkeys to a more "natural" animal that can raise their young and help the breed survive. This desire may kill the breed. Bourbon Red Turkeys have never lived on their own, they are a commercial breed developed in the 1900 and raised for meat. If you want to save the breed you need people to buy the meat, which then encourages people to raise the breed to meet the demand. This means it has to be affordable. Having birds sit on their own eggs and raise the breed means a female may raise 6 or 7 birds a year. They can produce up to 50 eggs/year, artificially incubated that's 50 turkeys. Heritage turkeys are already expensive enough to raise and sell, you don't need to increase costs more. Over the last 100 years they almost died out since they have little economic value and are raised as a hobby. If we're not careful they will be lost forever.

Her parts of the book are mixed with commentary from her partner and daughter. She's pretty lose with the facts in the first place, but in these asides lack total balance or realism. They really do detract from the book.

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Didn't expect to like it but I really enjoyed it!

First of all, I almost always like when the author/biographer reads the book and especially enjoyed this one. When I first saw the summary on this book - I didn't order it because I didn't want to hear about how animals are "processed". However, that subject was handled very well (knew what happened but didn't have to hear the gory details) plus there were no pigs or cows that were "famred. I learned so much and even bought the hard book to send to my dad (an amateur gardener). I already enjoy organic food whenever I can and now feel better about the people who farm it and the extra price. Really loved it. While her political views are not surprising liberal - I am glad to see that she understands that changes can and should not be forced by gov't. This book probably did more than a million programs!!!

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

Hard Listening

After listening to about 2/3 of this book, I took it off my iPod. Just the narrators' tones alone made it difficult enough, but then the book got preachy. I admire Barbara Kingsolver and love her fiction. I respect her family's life choices and applaud their commitment to sustainable food sources. Just give me professional narrators, especially if some of the content tends toward the righteous.

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Non-audio might be better

This may be one of the few audiobooks that would be better in the abridged form or just left as a book. I would have liked to skip through some of the sermons. Unfortunately, Kingsolver's sing-songy reading style also annoyed me. I listen in my car, and had to turn the volume on high so I could hear the end of each sentence -- when she apparently runs out of breath and drops out. HOWEVER, her story is fascinating and I learned a lot. I'd just recommend listening to a snippet first to see if you can handle her kindergarten-teacher reading style.

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

Sample before you buy

I listed to this book for about 2 hours and gave up on it. The writer is constantly using metaphores. It becomes very distracting, after an hour you want the writer to just say what they mean and MOVE ON.
Try it if you like overy descriptive writing.

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Kingsolver is always good

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is an interesting story of a year-long experiment with eating wholesome, locally grown food, eliminating almost all foods coming from another state or region. There is much to be learned from their experiment. This is also a good read. Kingsolver tells a tale well, whatever the tale.

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3 people found this helpful