Book Review: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

Title:  Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
Author:  Barbara Kingsolver
Genre:  Non-fiction/Food memoir
Publisher:  Harper Perennial
Pages:  400
Acquired via:  Borrowed from my sister


Rating:


Synopsis from goodreads.com:  Author Barbara Kingsolver and her family abandoned the industrial-food pipeline to live a rural life—vowing that, for one year, they'd only buy food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is an enthralling narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat.

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I loved Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, but the only problem now is... I want to buy a farm.  Or at least start growing my own food.  The book really opened my eyes to how our food industry works, or more correctly, doesn't work, and how we can make even small changes in how we eat or shop for food that would positively affect our health and local economy.

Why I loved it

• The story  -  Kingsolver and her family move back to her husband's family's farm and decide to live for one year eating only food they can grow themselves or buy locally.  They have to face challenges, like giving up certain foods, such as bananas or fresh fruit in winter, and having to butcher their own chickens and turkeys.  I don't think I could ever kill a chicken, so if I'd tried this experiment, I'd either become a vegetarian or I'd buy it from a local farmer.  But I did think it was amazing that this family was able to take on this challenge and succeed.  I found it uplifting and inspiring.
• The tone  -  A book with nothing but dry facts about the food industry would probably have bored me to tears.  Kingsolver's book is a great read because she writes with such a great tone.  She delivers the facts but with sarcasm and humor.  And I love sarcasm, so it definitely worked for me.
• The writing  -  The writing throughout the book is beautiful.  Descriptive as well as informative, I felt like I was reading a literary memoir while also learning something.
• Co-authors  -  One of my favorite parts of the book was that Kingsolver's husband and daughter both contributed to the story.  Kingsolver's husband, Steven Hopp, is a college professor, and he writes small essays within each chapter.  Each one pertains to the topic Kingsolver is discussing, but his essays are more like the bare facts.  And Kingsolver's daughter, Camille, wrote a story at the end of almost every chapter.  She shared insight on how it felt to be a teenager/college student going through this huge food journey.  She also includes recipes and weekly meal plans for each month.
• The facts  -  While I was very happy that the book wasn't just an encyclopedia of facts, I was also grateful for the inclusion of statistics and research.  It made the book and Kingsolver's stance credible.  It also helps with presenting this book or its ideas to others who might be skeptical.  Having a solid foundation in fact made the book very persuasive.

This book definitely made me think.  It also made me decide to make some changes in my lifestyle.  While I realistically won't be buying a farm, and I don't have the time/space to plant a garden, I am trying to cut out as much processed food as I can.  I also want to shop for my produce more locally, buy free-range meats and eggs, and avoid hormone-filled dairy.  Each step will not only be beneficial to my health, but it will also help support local farmers (another major focus of the book).  With all of its anecdotes, recipes, research, and humor, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is definitely an inspirational and eye-opening memoir that I would recommend to anyone.

Title:  The Lady in the Palazzo
Author:  Marlena de Blasi
Format:  Paperback
Pages:  317
Genre:  Memoir/Travelogue
Read:  2010

Rating:  B+

Synopsis (from the publisher):  Orvieto, an ancient Italian city rising above the cliffs of Umbria, is among the most dramatic in Europe. It is here that Marlena de Blasi, author of the national bestseller A Thousand Days in Venice, sets out to make a home—in the former ballroom of a dilapidated sixteenth-century palazzo—and win over her neighbors, who include artisans, counts, shepherds, and a lone violinist. Though wary of a stranger in their midst, they find her passion for the fine arts of cooking and eating irresistible, and together they create a spectacular feast as breathtaking as the city itself.

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Better than That Summer in Sicily, but still not as good as A Thousand Days in Tuscany.  This addition to de Blasi's memoirs is full of interesting characters, fun anecdotes, and great descriptions.  But for me, it lacked the passion of her first two books.  I just didn't connect with her or her new neighbors the way I did in A Thousand Days.  It was still a good book, but I found myself skimming through parts of it.  Maybe it's partly because I've never bought a home that needed renovations, which is why those parts of the book seemed tedious (just like Under the Tuscan Sun).  I think the biggest reason I struggled to enjoy this book was because de Blasi herself struggled with her inclusive neighbors and lazy Italian contractors, and that struggle came through in her writing.  A great picture of Tuscan culture, but not as appealing as de Blasi's other works.  B+

Title:  That Summer in Sicily: A Love Story
Author:  Marlena de Blasi
Format:  Paperback
Pages:  336
Genre:  Memoir/Travelogue
Read:  2010

Rating:  B-

Description (from publisher):  “At villa Donnafugata, long ago is never very far away,” writes bestselling author Marlena de Blasi of the magnificent if somewhat ruined castle in the mountains of Sicily that she stumbles upon one summer while traveling with her husband. There de Blasi is befriended by Tosca, the patroness of the villa, who shares her own unforgettable love story. In a luminous and tantalizing voice, de Blasi re-creates Tosca’s life and romance with the last prince of Sicily descended from the French nobles of Anjou. But when Prince Leo attempts to better the lives of his peasants, his defiance of the local Mafia costs him dearly. The present-day narrative finds Tosca sharing her considerable inherited wealth with a harmonious society composed of many of the women–now widowed–who once worked the prince’s land alongside their husbands. This marvelous epic drama reminds us that in order to live a rich life, one must embrace both life’s sorrow and its beauty.

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I normally love Marlena de Blasi's books on food and Italy.  But this one disappointed me, mostly because I wanted to hear about the Sicily that de Blasi explored, not the life of her Sicilian hostess Tosca.  I was really looking forward to a book about Sicilian food and the adventures that de Blasi and her husband experienced.  Instead, I read the "auto"-biography of Tosca, and although her life was exciting and full of adventure, it didn't capture my interest.  I never got drawn into the story the way I did with A Thousand Days in Tuscany.  It's still a great book, but not as interesting (to me) as de Blasi's previous memoirs.  I did love the ending; I am, after all, a sucker for happy endings.  But I think if I want to read a book about modern-day Sicily, I'm going to have to look somewhere else.  B-

Title:  Keeping the Feast: One Couple's Story of Love, Food, and Healing in Italy
Author:  Paula Butturini
Format:  Hardcover
Pages:  259
Genre:  Memoir

Rating:  C

Synopsis (from publisher):  A story of food and love, injury and healing, Keeping the Feast is the triumphant memoir of one couple's nourishment and restoration in Italy after a period of tragedy, and the extraordinary sustaining powers of food, family, and friendship.

Paula and John met in Italy, fell in love, and four years later, married in Rome. But less than a month after the wedding, tragedy struck. They had transferred from their Italian paradise to Warsaw and while reporting on an uprising in Romania, John was shot and nearly killed by sniper fire. Although he recovered from his physical wounds in less than a year, the process of healing had just begun. Unable to regain his equilibrium, he sank into a deep sadness that reverberated throughout their relationship. It was the abrupt end of what they'd known together, and the beginning of a new phase of life neither had planned for. All of a sudden, Paula was forced to reexamine her marriage, her husband, and herself.

Paula began to reconsider all of her previous assumptions about healing. She discovered that sometimes patience can be a vice, anger a virtue. That sometimes it is vital to make demands of the sick, that they show signs of getting better. And she rediscovered the importance of the most fundamental of human rituals: the daily sharing of food around the family table.

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Besides being an emotionally-draining book to read, Keeping the Feast was a disappointment for me.  The way people talked about it, the way it was described, led me to believe that this book was going to be similar to Marlena de Blasi's Thousand Days books, just with some more serious obstacles for the author and her husband to overcome.  I expected descriptions of food and Italy; I thought the book would focus on the healing that came from that food and that country.  Instead, I got the taxing, joy-sapping story of clinical depression, near-fatal wounds, suicide... Definitely not light reading.

The first half of the book focuses on all of the horrible things that kept happening to the author and especially her husband.  I'd read a chapter and then have to turn on a mindless comedy so I'd stop feeling so depressed.  Then the next quarter of the book was about the steps the Butturinis took towards that healing, much of which didn't even happen in Italy.  It was only in the final chapters of the book that the healing actually seemed to begin.  The food, which was supposed to be such an integral part, seemed secondary and scarce.  And the "happy" ending seemed rushed... because it was.  Butturini focused so much time describing the problems, she left almost nothing for the resolution.

Despite my disappointment, I didn't hate the book.  If I'd been more mentally prepared for what the book was really about, I'd have been perfectly fine with it.  If it had been described to me as a memoir on overcoming huge obstacles, without any mention of food or Italy, then I would have rated this book higher.  But because the memoir was supposed to have a big focus on both food & Italy (heck, it says so in the title), I had very different expectations.  C

Title:  A Thousand Days in Venice: An Unexpected Romance
Author:  Marlena de Blasi
Format:  Hardcover
Pages:  270
Genre:  Memoir/Travelogue/Romance
Date Started:  May 20, 2010
Date Finished:  May 21, 2010

Rating:  A-

Description (from Barnes & Noble):  He saw her across the Piazza San Marco and fell in love from afar. When he sees her again in a Venice café a year later, he knows it is fate. He knows little English; and she, a divorced American chef, speaks only food-based Italian. Marlena thinks she is incapable of intimacy, that her heart has lost its capacity for romantic love. But within months of their first meeting, she has packed up her house in St. Louis to marry Fernando—“the stranger,” as she calls him—and live in that achingly lovely city in which they met.

Vibrant but vaguely baffled by this bold move, Marlena is overwhelmed by the sheer foreignness of her new home, its rituals and customs. But there are delicious moments when Venice opens up its arms to Marlena. She cooks an American feast of Mississippi caviar, cornbread, and fried onions for the locals . . . and takes the tango she learned in the Poughkeepsie middle school gym to a candlelit trattoría near the Rialto Bridge. All the while, she and Fernando, two disparate souls, build an extraordinary life of passion and possibility.

Featuring Marlena’s own incredible recipes, A Thousand Days in Venice is the enchanting true story of a woman who opens her heart—and falls in love with both a man and a city.

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When's the next flight to Venice?  After reading this book, I wanted more than anything to find the fastest way to Venice, and make my home there.  Marlena de Blasi's style of writing, her descriptions of Venice, her gift for conveying emotions so well.  All of these worked together to make a great book.

I read de Blasi's Thousand Days books out of order, but each stands on their own, so it didn't matter that I knew already where de Blasi and her husband would end up.  The main reason this book was so different from its sequel is that the focuses of the two books are completely different.  In her second book, de Blasi wrote about the people and food of Tuscany.  She focused on her relationships to those people and to that food.  In this book, de Blasi is more interested in describing her romance and marriage to "the stranger", her move from one culture to another, her struggle to reconcile her old life with her new one.  She was definitely a brave woman to risk everything by selling her home, quitting her job, and moving to Venice to be with a man she barely knew.

This book also incorporated the Italian language like the sequel, but unlike the sequel, translations were rarely included, so I felt like I missed out on something.  Very well-written overall, but I think I actually prefer Tuscany to Venice.  A-

Title: A Thousand Days in Tuscany: A Bittersweet Adventure
Author: Marlena de Blasi
Format: Paperback
Pages: 325
Genre: Memoir/Travelogue/Cookbook
Date Started: ???
Date Finished: May 1, 2010

Rating: A-

Description (from Barnes & Noble): They had met and married on perilously short acquaintance, she an American chef and food writer, he a Venetian banker. Now they were taking another audacious leap, unstitching their ties with exquisite Venice to live in a roughly renovated stable in Tuscany.

Once again, it was love at first sight. Love for the timeless countryside and the ancient village of San Casciano dei Bagni, for the local vintage and the magnificent cooking, for the Tuscan sky and the friendly church bells. Love especially for old Barlozzo, the village mago, who escorts the newcomers to Tuscany’s seasonal festivals; gives them roasted country bread drizzled with just-pressed olive oil; invites them to gather chestnuts, harvest grapes, hunt truffles; and teaches them to caress the simple pleasures of each precious day. It’s Barlozzo who guides them across the minefields of village history and into the warm and fiercely beating heart of love itself.

A Thousand Days in Tuscany is set in one of the most beautiful places on earth–and tucked into its fragrant corners are luscious recipes (including one for the only true bruschetta) directly from the author’s private collection.

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Thank you, thank you, thank you to my sister for getting me this book!! It was fun, romantic, interesting, with recipes and descriptions of food that made you want to jump on the first plane to Tuscany just to eat there.

This book is what Under the Tuscan Sun should have been. If you read my review on that book, you know that I think the movie is a thousand times better than the book. I didn't even bother to finish reading it, it was so long-winded and boring. A Thousand Days in Tuscany has almost the same premise, but it's written a zillion times better. In both books, the main character is a remarried woman moving to a pretty run-down home in a small Tuscan village with her husband. She struggles to make the place livable and to become a part of the community. But Under the Tuscan Sun failed at making its story interesting because of drawn-out descriptions of construction and a whole chapter on the location of wells on the property. There was no personal, emotional connection with the people in the story because they came second to the story of the house's reconstruction. The reason I think A Thousand Days in Tuscany is such a success is because it switched the focus to the people and their lives and emotions. It was so easy to relate to de Blasi because she allowed you into her thoughts. She wrote about the people she met, her husband, herself. They made Tuscany seem much more alive and real.

I love the way de Blasi writes too. Since everyone around her is speaking Italian, she writes their dialogue in their native tongue, followed by the English translation. Some might find that annoying, but I liked it. I think it was her way of showing that the Italians said it better. It also helped me learn a new language. I didn't learn a lot of course, but at least now I know certain words and phrases.

I guess my only problem with the book was one chapter that just seemed unnecessary. That chapter also includes some content which I'm hesitant to let my sister read. It was just a very awkward, somewhat inappropriate, and completely pointless part of an awesome story. The rest of the book was great, and as soon as I found out my library had de Blasi's first memoir, I ordered it right away. A-

My first "Incomplete"

Title: Under the Tuscan Sun
Author: Frances Mayes
Format: Paperback
Pages: 304
Genre: Memoir/Travelogue
Date Started: August 28, 2009
Date Finished: DIDN'T!

Rating: Incomplete

Description from Barnes & Noble: In the spirit of Peter Mayle's bestselling memoir A Year in Provence, gourmet and poet Frances Mayes chronicles her experience of buying, restoring, and residing in an abandoned villa in the Tuscan countryside. In rich, golden prose, Mayes details the long summer days spent working in the garden, excursions to the nearby towns and markets, and joyful interactions with the local people. Mayes lets armchair travelers share the joy of living in Italy through her wonderful memoir.

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I love reading memoirs, especially memoirs involving travel (Ruth Reichl's memoirs are amazing), but I'm sorry; I just couldn't finish this. And I've been reading it since August! I grabbed this book thinking it would be a good read while I was waiting for my plane to Florida. Worst choice ever. The book was so boring, I couldn't keep my eyes open. Just writing about this book and remembering it, is making me tired.

One of the most disappointing aspects of this book is that it's nothing like the movie. I know that sounds awful, but sometimes the stuff Hollywood adds to movie-versions of a book actually improve the story. In this case, Hollywood took the basic idea: woman buys house in Tuscany (although in the book, it was both Frances and her second husband who buy and renovate it together), keeps a few details from the book that were interesting, and made a whole new story around those. Frances bought the house with her second husband Ed; the Polish workers who make up a big part of the comedic element in the movie are only in the book for one chapter; there is no romantic anything in the book. Not with Frances or her neighbors or the Polish workers. Nothing. And since I didn't finish the book, I have no idea if the gay best friend even exists or if she's entirely a Hollywood fabrication.

Most of the book was made up of renovating details, and some side trips to the neighboring cities and towns. One chapter in particular was maddening. I think if I had to read that they found another hidden well one more time, I was going to chuck the book down one. If you're into books about home renovations and endless details about the roads in Italy, then this is the book for you. If you're expecting something close to the movie, don't even bother trying to read this. Incomplete