Synopsis
Meditative essays from novelist Barbara Kingsolver, on life in the desert, working motherhood, landlocked hermit crabs, and other subjects. A sample: "In my first three years of high school, the number of times I got asked out on a date was zero. This is not an approximate number."
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1995-10-01 | | Illustrator: | Paul Mirocha |
| Size | | Length: | 273 pages | | Height: | 8.5 in | | Width: | 6.0 in | | Thickness: | 1.2 in | | Weight: | 16.8 oz |
Publisher's Note
Barbara Kingsolver has entertained and touched the lives of legions of readers with her critically acclaimed and bestselling novels The Bean Trees, Animal Dreams, and Pigs in Heaven. In these twenty-five newly conceived essays, she returns once again to her favored literary terrain to explore the themes of family, community, and the natural world. With the eyes of a scientist and the vision of a poet, Kingsolver writes about notions as diverse as modern motherhood, the history of private property, and the suspended citizenship of humans in the animal kingdom. Her canny pursuit of meaning from an inscrutable world compels us to find instructions for life in surprising places: a museum of atomic bomb relics, a West African voodoo love charm, a family of paper dolls, the ethics of a wild pig who persistently invades a garden, a battle of wills with a two-year-old, or a troop of oysters who observe high tide in the middle of Illinois. In sharing her thoughts about the urgent business of being alive, Kingsolver the essayist employs the same keen eyes, persuasive tongue, and understanding heart that characterize her acclaimed fiction. Defiant, funny, courageously honest, High Tide in Tucsonproves once again that "there is no one quite like Barbara Kingsolver in contemporary literature."--Washington Post Book World
Industry Reviews
"These essays...are charming because observations of Kingsolver's incomplete self are mixed with larger observations about the real world...."
Philadelphia Inquirer - Susan Salter Reynolds (09/24/1995)
"Much of Kingsolver's writing is transparent; it flows by with as little turbulence as a clear stream. But there is nothing artless about it, and the literary mind at work becomes visible now and then in the sudden splash of a figure of speech."
Smithsonian - Paul Trachtman (06/19/1996)
"Kingsolver displays considerable nature-writing talent."
Grafton
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