Small Wonder

by Kingsolver, Barbara

• ISBN13: 9780060504076
• ISBN10: 0060504072
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-01-01
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Illustrated Catalog of Wonders	xi
Foreword	xiii
Small Wonder	1	(21)
Saying Grace	22	(9)
Knowing Our Place	31	(10)
The Patience of a Saint	41	(9)
Seeing Scarlet	50	(10)
Setting Free the Crabs	60	(15)
A Forest's Last Stand	75	(13)
Called Out	88	(5)
A Fist in the Eye of God	93	(16)
Lily's Chickens	109	(22)
The One-Eyed Monster, and Why I Don't Let Him In	131	(13)
Letter to a Daughter at Thirteen	144	(16)
Letter to My Mother	160	(16)
Going to Japan	176	(4)
Life Is Precious, or It's Not	180	(4)
Flying	184	(11)
Household Words	195	(11)
What Good Is a Story?	206	(9)
Marking a Passage	215	(7)
Taming the Beast with Two Backs	222	(6)
Stealing Apples	228	(7)
And Our Flag Was Still There	235	(11)
God's Wife's Measuring Spoons	246	(19)
Acknowledgments	265