Title: Small Wonder
Author: Barbara Kingsolver (very much alive, and entitled to royalty payments if you buy the book from me).
Author's web page: http://www.kingsolver.com/
Date: 2002
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0-06-050406-2
Length: 264 pages plus foreword and acknowledgments
Illustrations: drawings by Paul Mirocha
Quote: "I began this book, without exactly knowing I was doing so, on September 12, 2001."
After the physical attacks by Al-Qaeda on September 11 came the long siege of emotional terrorism by People Who Are Part of the Problem (Without Knowing It), which began, in the newspapers, on September 12. It was a weird season for writers. Even comedy writers were asked to write about The Tragedies, not because they had anything to say that anyone else didn't know, but so that certain newspapers could print All September 11 All The Time.
The emotion I remember feeling in the last third of the year 2001 was irritation. So much that was being said and written about the situation in the United States, or even in Washington, showed such total ignorance about what the people I knew were actually thinking, feeling, doing.
Real memories: The autumn of 2001 was beautiful, with day after day of picture-perfect weather. Grass had grown over the graves where my father had been buried in January and my husband's brother in November. Cormorants moved into the Anacostia Waterfront Park. Some creep mailed anthrax culture to a few personal enemies at the same time that a nasty strep infection was going through the D.C. schools. Despite strep throat my husband and I went to Stitches Fair and Knit Out.
Some reverberations from The Tragedies did reach us. We turned down a trip to Ireland because the airlines had become so tiresome. We discussed a Caribbean cruise, then ended up actually going to a memorial service for a friend who died of cancer in California. First we laughed at W Bush's advice to patriotic Americans to spend money ("What did you do in the War on Terrorism, Daddy?" "I charged!"), and then we did some serious thinking and writing about the benefits of buying locally produced items, which did not include the China-made flags other people were buying.
Barbara Olson, whose books I'd cited in research writing, was on one of the planes that were hijacked. That was sad, but the losses of personal friends and relatives and the well-earned success of another friend's book (the book parties started in January) took up more of our emotional energy.
I mention this because it resonates with some of the essays in Small Wonder. Kingsolver was not a newspaper wage slave obliged to crank out a certain number of words about yesterday's headlines before breakfast. She had lots of things to say that other people were not saying. She was writing about pollution and conservation, wildlife and child life, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, being a successful novelist, foreign aid, national parks, pesticides, the "locavore" eating plan, going to Japan, the Columbine tragedy. She mentions in Small Wonder that she felt only about as sad, when John Kennedy (junior) died, as she imagined Caroline Kennedy would have felt if a member of the Kingsolver family had died. And some people were outraged. How dare people be more emotionally involved with their own lives than with the public events blaring out of the TV.
The four "September 11" essays in Small Wonder are, to my mind, dreadful...but then all of them were. They were products of a very bad idea: the idea of cheapening the real grief and anguish some people were feeling by ramming phony anguish down the nation's throats until mass nausea set in.
The other essays in Small Wonder are Green and/or literary. They contain some opinions I don't support, but they also contain so many useful facts and quotes that I bought this book for reference purposes anyway. The natural history pieces are beautiful.
There is one inexcusable mistake in this book. Kingsolver is a native of Kentucky. After living in the West for several years, she moved to Virginia. She doesn't want to name the town in Small Wonder. I won't name it either, although I know which town it is...but it's not Appalachia. In Kentucky "Appalachia" may mean the mountainous half of the state, but in Virginia it is the name of one particular town. Kingsolver has been here long enough to know.
There is also some very good writing, research, and thinking in this book. There is, for example, the discussion of genetic modification on pages 93-108. I've read longer and shorter, older and newer, essays on this topic. From time to time I've even contemplated writing one. I remain unconvinced that a better essay on genetic modification can be written. If you've not made a study of this topic, Small Wonder is an excellent place to begin.
I completely agree with Kingsolver on genetic modification. I completely disagree with her on the place of cats in our ecology. So I can tell you that it's possible to enjoy her writing even if you're reading it to use her facts for the purpose of further research intended to refute her interpretation of the facts. Small Wonder and this writer's other books are recommended to anyone who is not frightened by numbers and who appreciates a well-rounded, realistic, humanitarian approach to science.
(To buy it here, scroll down until you see a Paypal purchase button.)
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