Binding: Hardcover
Edition: Fourth Printing
Label: Harpercollins
Manufacturer: Harpercollins
Publication Date: 1995-01-01
Publisher: Harpercollins
Studio: Harpercollins

Customer Rating:
Summary: High tide everywhere
Comment: The title story in this collection is that of a stowaway hermit crab that Kingsolver inadvertently carried from the Bahamas to her home in Tucson in a collection of shells she had collected for her young daughter. As she explains, "If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can." "Buster's" behavior occasions wide ranging observations (the author's education was as a naturalist), including the desert tides, and becomes a metaphor for Kingsolver's own dislocation from a rural Kentucky childhood to the Sonoran desert. As an essayist, I am very taken with the author's easy flow from the general to the particular, from the wild world to that of culture, her take on what writing does and what reading means, and the self-deprecating humor with which she fords the flash floods in the arroyo of her life. Her social conscience is as profound as her love of family and friends, leading her to self-exile in the Canary Islands in painful rejection of the war boosterism during our adventures in Iraq, and to the end of that exile when the missing faces in her life could no longer be borne.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: All time favourite
Comment: This is my favourite book of all time. I repeatedly go back to chapters to re-read and I have recommended this book to many people over the years.
Barbara Kingsolver's writing and way of looking at the world is thought-provoking and fresh.
My only complaint, as with all of Kingsolver's books, is that one eventually comes to the end!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Art to Move Mountains (or Hermit Crab Shells)
Comment: Kingsolver holds reign neck and neck with Annie Dillard as two of my favorite naturalist writers and essayists. Kingsolver holds her own as a novelist. In this collection of essays, rewritten and expanded versions, in many cases, from what has been previously published in various magazines, Kingsolver's skill and talent as an essayist shimmers with brilliance and sheer entertainment. Even when she is teaching us a lesson and hammering it home.

Topics have wide range, covering nature, art, values and ethics, human nature and its foibles, politics, and travels. Whether she is pondering the biological clocks of hermit crabs or espousing her views on violence and objectification of women on the silver screen, or taking the reader along on the harsh realities of a not so glamorous book tour, her language is lush and poetic, flowing and vibrant, clever and memorable. I have been quoting her words to anyone who will listen ever since reading the book, and thinking back to it as a kind of measuring stick for my personal observations of daily life.

So what moved you to begin such a boycott of violence in movies? a friend asked me over lunch yesterday. We had been talking about popular contemporary movies, and why I had made sometimes surprising - to others - choices. And it hit me. While my inclination had been moving in that direction for some time now, it was Kingsolver's essay, "Careful What You Let In the Door," that had pushed me into a conscious awareness of how my viewing choices affected every other part of my life, the daily and even seemingly miniscule choices I make. The results of such choices have been almost immediately apparent to me - as was now my choice to steer clear. The desensitization I had experienced toward atrocities in the news, to the daily disrespect I witness in various human interactions and my regretful tolerance of it, hardly registering as a bump in my path, was lifting. Newly aware, I have been surfacing as if from a deep and dumb sleep.

Kingsolver writes about her literary profession that writers may not write with politics in mind, yet "good art is political." As is hers. Words can and should move us, good art should change us, and a good writer is a person who wields a pen more powerful than any sword.

In this particular essay, Kingsolver explores the function of violence in art (or media in general), visual or literary. Too often, she notes (my lunch partner nodding in agreement), such violence is perpetrated against women. "It turns out," writes Kingsolver about an inadvertant movie choice, "I'd rented the convincing illusion of helpless, attractive women being jeopardized, tortured, or dead, for no good reason I could think of after it was over." Pondering this, she concludes that violence in movies or video games (or various other formats) too often appears merely for its sensationalist effect, while in literature a writer has the ability to expand upon a violent scene to fully show its consequences. Because violence always has consequences. It is the absence of those consequences in our daily media diet, too often our entertainment choices, separate from the realm of reality, that has led to a society that hardly blinks at its constant appearance upon the screens of our minds. All of which, she argues, with time turns us into hardened and numb creatures, willing to not only view violence, but to tolerate it, potentially even to participate in it.

So an essay moves us to change our viewing habits. Art creates positive change. But Kingsolver can just as easily write an essay that makes us laugh, as in her story of joining a literary rock band, allowing herself to look the fool for our sympathetic pleasure. Or her struggles as a parent. Although in "Somebody's Baby," her message again takes on a ponderous seriousness in considering how little we care for our youngest generations, even while we claim to be a family oriented society. Her call to us in this essay is to consider that it is not just the parent's job to care for the child, but it is the obligation and heart-calling to the community at large, to the entire nation, to care for and nurture our young. We are, she writes, raising Presidents-in-training, yet our attitude is "every family for itself."

What I love about Kingsolver's essays is that they are beautifully written, literary works of art. Yet each and every one carries a deeper meaning, a message, a call to arms, even those written with the relish of humor. It is art with consequence.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Best book ever
Comment: I feel sad that at age 69 I discovered this book. I plan to send it to my daugter, daugher-in-law, and my neice who is a new bride. What wonderful insights and fatanstic advice for raising a child and then again, for not having children and living your own life according to your own needs and wants. Fabulous!!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Lovely but long
Comment: Some of the essays in this book are fine examples of Kingsolver's eloquent, thoughtful, and funny writing. I found that the book dragged after a while, however, rehashing the same themes over again in different essays, and sometimes becoming a bit preachy. Although I liked this book, I would tell others to read "Prodigal Summer" instead, which is gorgeous, start to finish.

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