Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver

Kingsolver, with contributions from her husband Steven L. Hopp, and daughter Camille Kingsolver, tells the story of how her family lived for a year eating--almost--only locally grown food. A large part of their diet came from their own farm, the rest from farmer's markets and other local sources.

The book is one of the most readable pieces of non-fiction I've picked up in a long time. I will admit that I didn't read every recipe in there, but I did glance through a few of them, and actually read one or two.

Much information is imparted to the reader of Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. I learned that sweet potatoes and potatoes are not actually related. Another potato fact: those who eat the entire potato, skin and all (me), are probably consuming a lot of chemicals left over from insecticides and pesticides that have long been illegal to use, but are still residing in the soil.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of varieties of vegetables, fruits, and--perhaps the greatest surprise--livestock (chickens, turkeys, goats, pigs, sheep, and more), that are threatened by extinction because large-scale agribusiness corporate farms use only a very few--and large corporations like Monsanto and ADM produce genetically modified seeds that are patented, and may not be gathered and re-used, further reducing the varieties of corn, tomatoes, beans, beets, peas, apples, oranges, pears--you name it.

There is not a little controversy about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the current news and literature, but not until reading this book have I felt that I understand much better what exactly is at stake. Certainly we are risking our health by eating these products whose effects are unknown except for some limited laboratory testing. But there are further, more complicated dangers, not the least of which is that our food supply is becoming dependent on the production of these Frankenstein's Monsters, which puts humanity itself at the mercy of a few enormous corporations.

Having said all this, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral is not a shrieking revolutionary diatribe. It is, rather, a pleasant and positive story of how a family could relate to food, meals, and eating. It provides a vision of health and a way of life that is very attractive in our modern world. Not a little of the discussion is about how we spend our time, for those who would grow their own food, even some of it, will spend a lot of time raising, harvesting, and preparing it. This may be seen as brutal, hard work --and no doubt, it is--but it is also, according to Kingsolver, satisfying, and rewarding, not only to the body but to the soul.

We cannot and will not all become small farmers, but we can move in the direction of eating food produced in our local environment, supporting small farmers, and being aware of where our food comes from and how it affects our health, our lives, and the health and lives of our neighbors.


http://animalvegetablemiracle.com/

Elsewhere, by Richard Russo

This is a memoir, and Russo mentions early on that it will be mostly about his mother, and that is quite true. Nevertheless, being an Upstate New York expatriate myself, I found reading about Gloversville and Russo's relationship with the area and its people irresistible.

In fourth grade or thereabouts, we learned some basic area history, and we were taught about the "glove cities" of Fonda, Johnstown, and Gloversville. I don't believe that we were taught quite everything that Russo relates in his book: the horrible working conditions, the disregard for the employees' safety, the environmental destruction, and the overseas flight that the corporations took to avoid the inconvenience of providing a living wage and complying with legal requirements to destroy neither their employees' health nor the quality of the Mohawk River's water.

Russo's account of his life with his mother comprises most of this book. She was a profoundly disturbed individual, but at the same time committed to her son, and determined that he should be a success. His love for her is quite obvious in these pages.

Here's a much better review than I will write.

MaddAddam, by Margaret Atwood

This is the third part of a trilogy that began with Oryx & Crake,  and continued with The Year of the Flood. I was pleased to find that the book began with a brief recap of the first two books, as it's been quite some time since I read them. In this one, we find the surviving humans along with some modified-humans (The Crakers), and many another interesting life-form in the post-chaos world.

A lot of the book is made up of flashbacks into Zeb's life, back to the time when he and Adam were half-brothers living with their father, "The Rev." This is pre-Flood, at the height of Corporate power in Atwood's future Earth.

Atwood's writing is, as always, unintrusive, economical, precise, and entertaining.

What could be a drab indictment of the present environmental atrocities committed all about us is kept alive as a very readable story by the interesting and sympathetic characters she has created in this trilogy.

Be advised: one is not left with a warm, fuzzy view of the future.

NY Times Sunday Book Review

Margaret Atwood's Web Site

Future Dramatization of the Trilogy

Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen

Patty Berglund (nee Emerson)

Walter Berglund Patty's husband
Richard Katz Walter's friend, and at times Patty's lover, but that's complicated.

Joey Berglund
Janice Berglund ... son and daughter of Patty and Walter

From p.200 , on which Richard (a successful musician and songwriter currently broke due to his own behavior) is being "interviewed" by the son of a wealthy customer for whom he is building a rooftop deck in Manhattan:

Q. What do you think of the MP3 revolution?

A. Ah, revolution, wow. It's great to hear the word "revolution" again. It's great that a song now costs exactly the same as a pack of gum and lasts exactly the same amount of time before it loses its flavor and you have to spend another buck. That era which finally ended whenever, yesterday--you know, that era when we pretended rock was the scourge of conformity and consumerism, instead of its anointed handmaid--that era was really irritating to me. I think it's good for the honesty of rock and roll and good for the country in general that we can finally see Bob Dylan and Iggy Pop for what they really were: as manufacturers of wintergreen Chiclets.

Q. So you're saying that rock has lost its subversive edge?

A. I'm saying it never had any subversive edge. It was always wintergreen Chiclets, we just enjoyed pretending otherwise.

Q. What about when Dylan went electric?

A. If you're going to talk about ancient history, let's go back to the French Revolution. Remember when, I forget his name, but that rocker who wrote the "Marseillaise," Jean Jacques Whoever--remember when his song started getting all that airplay in 1792, and suddenly the peasantry rose up and overthrew the aristocracy? There was a song that changed the world. Attitude was what the peasants were missing. They already had everything else--humiliating servitude, grinding poverty, unpayable debts, horrific working conditions. But without a song, man, it added up to nothing. The sansculotte style was what really changed the world. 

I read this book slowly, from about the middle of January to yesterday (5 March 2014). It is, I think, a fairly decent characterization of our time. The characters are a little bit unbelievable, perhaps a little too cardboard-cutout for their own good, but nonetheless they all represent a bit of what makes up America in the early 21st century. The plot is well done, made up of the points of view of the main characters in a way that kept me interested -- because each of these people are quite intense, and they can begin to wear you out.

Should there be anyone here to read it, this book might be a good reference for future inhabitants of Earth.