High Tide in Tucson audiobook

I try not to do this often, but in this case, the New York Times Book Review review on the back of my paperback edition, really says everything about these 25 essays by Barbara Kingsolver that you need to know:Kingsolver's essays should be savored like quiet afternoons with a friend. ...She speaks in a language rich with music and replete with good sense."Couldn't have said it better myself.An enormously honest and personal collection of essays. If you like any of Kingsolver's books, I'm sure you will enjoy this one.

I read this collection of essays years ago, and remember how thought provoking I found them. Barbara Kingsolver is, of course an excellent writer; her fiction is beautiful. The great thing about High Tide in Tuscon is actually getting a glimpse of what's inside this writer's head - the everyday things as well as the grand. It's a pretty well rounded combination of essays that come across simply as "this is what I think now" or "this is what I've been thinking about lately" - in Kingsolver's voice, almost like glorified journal entries. I guess that's what I like about this book; it's stories can be dense, but the style in which they're written is invitingly simple. The bells and whistles got left at home. I like her ideas, and how she arrives at them.

From the title essay: Embrace your own biology. Don't beat yourself up for acting like the human animal that you are.The rest of the essays: I laughed out loud more times than I can say, and I felt more connected to humanity as I read them. This is a book I go back to and re-read over and over because of that. I don't always agree with everything she says, but the essays always make me think and evaluate my own beliefs, biases, prejudices, actions.

This is the first of Kingsolver's books that I read, and it's still my favorite, albeit that it's a collection of non-fiction essays. Maybe part of the reason is that I was also living in Tucson when I read it, so the things she had to say about life in that part of Arizona resonated with me. Beyond that, though, I just love the way she uses words - she writes lyrically.

It's been a while since I read these essays, and it's time for me to read them again. I remember, when I first read this book, it was on a horrible trip back to Cork, from San Francisco. My father was in hospital, having suffered some kind of major neurological setback, one of many on the long decline to his death in late 2002. Things were fairly touch and go, and there was a lot of waiting in hospital corridors. I was enormously grateful for the sanity and calm of Kingsolver's writing - this book helped me through a difficult time.

I read Prodigal Summer (last year, I think it was) and enjoyed it enormously. I really like the way Kingsolver uses words. So when another of her books was on offer (through Reading Seals, my book discussion group, just to borrow) I grabbed it. This book is a collection of essays. She took pieces she’d written for magazines and revised them, wrote a few more, and put them together in chapters ordered to be read as a book (i.e. front to back – acknowledging that some people don’t read books that way . . . – a concept I find delight in! She says, in fact: “I once heard from a reader in Kansas that he always starts books in the middle – even novels!”)I enjoyed every single page of this book. So many of the things she grapples with are things I also have spent time agonizing over or worrying about or pondering. Her pleasure in so many of the “small” things of life resonated with my own enjoyment of things such as ants scurrying, and tuis in the tree outside my window, and children discovering wonders. And she’s very witty.

I stole this from my mother-in-law about a year ago. Now I can finally give it back, but it's one of those that I liked so much that I'd rather just keep it. I haven't read anything by Kingsolver before so I have no idea how this compares to her other work, but it's a collection of shortish essays. Some are pretty funny, most are poignant, and all made me long for her writer's life. Time to get on that.

I love love love Kingsolver, and I think I love this collection of nonfiction essays even better than any of her fiction. It's written in the style of Annie Dillard, as a layperson who is interested in observation of the natural world and then exploration of underlying scientific principles. It's a beautifully written book and I reread it every several years.

Beautiful essays on diverse topics with an elegant writing style. We can learn the author’s insight on a day-today incidence. Starting from nature, environment to war and politics it covers diverse topics. Touched by the intricate observations and the way author connects different topics. Read this if you have interest in science, biology & evolution.

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. 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, and thinking back to it as a kind of measuring stick for my personal observations. So what moved you to begin such a boycott of violence in movies? a friend asked me. We had been talking about popular contemporary movies, and why I had made sometimes surprising choices. 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 seemingly miniscule choices I make. The results of such choices have been almost immediately apparent to me. 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, 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, 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, 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 entertainment. In "Somebody's Baby," her message 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 is to consider that it is not just the parent's job to care for the child, but it is the obligation of the 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.

Every so often, I become so enamored with an authorial voice that the writer in question could present to me the most unpalatable or trite subject matter and I’d ravenously lap it up, immediately yearning for more. Kingsolver’s writing falls under this umbrella. Even when I find her boomer progressivism eye-rollingly cliche, I’m willing to go along for the ride because her prose is just. that. beautiful. I found myself flinching when her early 90s liberal sensibilities caused her to skirt around the concrete demographic makeup of a Tucson neighborhood, instead obliquely referring to the abundance of Lady of Guadalupe statuary and pit bulls. Same went for the time when she referred to a Black acquaintance in an essay as, amongst other things, “articulate.” But I could endlessly devour her descriptions of misty Hawaiian islands, Saguaro-dotted desert landscapes, and the unassuming yet wondrous forests of her childhood home. Descriptions of nature usually roll off my shoulders unnoticed, paragraphs and pages hastily skipped over to get to the more interesting stuff. I would hazard to say that Kingsolver’s descriptions, in contrast, are so achingly beautiful that I savored these parts most of all. In fact, while I began this novel with a more intellectually driven investment in environmentalism (and a scared shitless outlook on climate change), I left this novel truly in love with the natural world.

I don't give many 5 stars but this book was really great. Barbara Kinsolver put together a bunch of her essays from various magazine and paper publications to create a book in which one really feels connected to the author. Kingsolver is known for her fiction works and she even discusses how many of her fans write to her thinking that they are based on truths even though they aren't. What this book allows for those fans is a real glimpse into her life and her thoughts on things from raising a hermit crab to politics to the environment. (She was a biology major in school.) What I really like is that she doesn't preach she just says what she thinks and really it all makes a lot of sense. Her rationale for things is sound. She is a true environmentalist and cares a lot about everyone. Her writing is down to earth and her essay about getting letters from fans made me want to write to her since she says she reads everything she gets whether people think it is a blessing or a curse. I highly highly recommend this book.