Barbara Kingsolver

Flight Behavior A novel Barbara Kingsolver Harper: 436 pp., $28.99 Strange things are happening in Appalachia. The natural world as we know it is coming to an end, overheated by human greed. "Global warming" is a dangerously loaded expression in the rural, Republican-loving, God-fearing Tennessee of Barbara Kingsolver's didactic and preachy new novel, "Flight Behavior. " The people of the fictional Feathertown have been taught by talk radio that it's a big-city scam concocted by Al Gore.

Flight Behavior A novel Barbara Kingsolver Harper: 436 pp., $28.99 Strange things are happening in Appalachia. The natural world as we know it is coming to an end, overheated by human greed. "Global warming" is a dangerously loaded expression in the rural, Republican-loving, God-fearing Tennessee of Barbara Kingsolver's didactic and preachy new novel, "Flight Behavior. " The people of the fictional Feathertown have been taught by talk radio that it's a big-city scam concocted by Al Gore.

"Kingsolver brings to our literary panorama a social consciousness that is bedrock to her rich prose style . . . as profoundly regional as uniquely global."

Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Lev Trotsky. The Mexican painter whose flamboyant art and mangled body continue to nourish a multimedia industry. The adored husband 21 years her elder, myth-making muralist and Mexican national hero. And the man on the lam whom this idealistic pair sheltered under their roof: a slight, bearded, twinkle-eyed legend, one of the troika who together dreamed up and then led to victory the Bolshevik Revolution. Trotsky was Lenin's treasured theoretician and comrade to Stalin until double-crossed by that lethal paranoiac.

Barbara Kingsolver's new novel, "Pigs in Heaven," takes up where her first novel, "The Bean Trees," left off, with the abandoned Cherokee girl, Turtle, and her adopted white mother, Taylor Greer, living in Tucson. Turtle is 6 years old now, still vaguely damaged from the abuse she suffered as an infant and toddler, but getting along fine in the world.

Barbara Kingsolver's splendid new novel "Pigs in Heaven" has won the affection of literary critics and the public. And because New York publishers are finally convinced that this community has a large contingent of appreciative readers--more than 300 turned out to meet Sue Grafton recently, according to local bookseller Ed Elrod--that they are sending major authors such as Kingsolver into Ventura. Come out to meet Kingsolver tonight at 7 in the Ventura Bookstore, 522 E. Main St.

Part of the complex pleasure of writing a short story is finding the proper measure of time for it. How much of a character's history can the story hold to illuminate but not overwhelm the present? Though it is now common for writers to portray a character's life only in the present, as if there were no such thing as the past bearing down, many wonderful stories are a kind of wrestling match between the past and the present.

Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Lev Trotsky. The Mexican painter whose flamboyant art and mangled body continue to nourish a multimedia industry. The adored husband 21 years her elder, myth-making muralist and Mexican national hero. And the man on the lam whom this idealistic pair sheltered under their roof: a slight, bearded, twinkle-eyed legend, one of the troika who together dreamed up and then led to victory the Bolshevik Revolution. Trotsky was Lenin's treasured theoretician and comrade to Stalin until double-crossed by that lethal paranoiac.

A WOMAN UNKNOWN Voices From a Spanish Life By Lucia Graves; Counterpoint: 288 pp., $25 The poet Robert Graves has been in danger, in the 15 years since his death, of being more read about than read. His famous life was fed by many deep springs: women, myth and the island of Majorca, where he lived with his family for 50 years. Shining out like a beacon from these books about Graves from photographs and text is the large-eyed figure of his daughter Lucia, born in 1943.

IT has been a remarkable year for books on eating: Marion Nestle's "What to Eat," Peter Singer's "The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter," Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma," Thomas McNamee's "Alice Waters and Chez Panisse" and Eric Schlosser's book for teens, "Chew on This." All share a distinctly here-are-the-facts-now-you-decide tone, analyzing what we eat through political, sensual, practical, economic and historical lenses. All show how marketing has distorted our choices.

Barbara Kingsolver ("No Glory in Unjust War on the Weak," Opinion, Oct. 14) claims that while her adversaries say she views the world in a childlike fashion she "know(s) how to look the world in the eye, however awful things are, and try to love it back." What she displays, though, is the shabby nihilism of the left that, while reaping the benefits of a pluralistic modern society, denies any moral responsibility for defending it against barbarism. Kent Schmidt La Canada Thank you, Barbara Kingsolver.

Re "No Glory in Unjust War on the Weak," Opinion, Oct. 14: Barbara Kingsolver argues that dumping a "few billion dollars into food, health care and education" in terrorist lands will buy cooperation and peace. Let me remind her that, in Egypt alone, since 1978, the U.S. has dumped billions and billions of dollars in foreign aid. From this benevolence we reaped the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a violently anti-American terrorist group that recently merged into Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorist network.

Barbara Kingsolver and the remnants of the leftist '60s are squirming in their peacenik souls, watching the country waving flags and uniting behind a determined president ("A Pure, High Note of Anguish," Opinion, Sept. 23). After boiling down her "I feel everybody's pain" drivel, what remains is the old leftist argument of moral equivalency. We Americans are just as guilty of terrorism (Hiroshima, Nicaragua, etc.) as anyone else, so the argument goes, but in our arrogance and isolation we've never "felt" its consequences.

A WOMAN UNKNOWN Voices From a Spanish Life By Lucia Graves; Counterpoint: 288 pp., $25 The poet Robert Graves has been in danger, in the 15 years since his death, of being more read about than read. His famous life was fed by many deep springs: women, myth and the island of Majorca, where he lived with his family for 50 years. Shining out like a beacon from these books about Graves from photographs and text is the large-eyed figure of his daughter Lucia, born in 1943.

Re "Life Is Precious--or It's Not," by Barbara Kingsolver, Commentary, May 2: At last! After hundreds of pages of newsprint and thousands of hours of radio and television blowhards, comes concise and eloquent truth about where responsibility for "teen violence" lies. As Kingsolver so precisely points out, teen violence only mimics the vastly more insidious and pervasive destruction our country metes out to others in so many different forms, be it actual bombs or the often more destructive sanctions that murder so many in Iraq and other places away from the headlines.

The rape of undeveloped countries, the exploitation of primitive peoples, the destruction of ancient traditions--these are themes usually attacked with the zeal of the newly converted. Barbara Kingsolver has written on social justice before, but she is no less fervent for it. In this powerful new epic, she addresses these issues through the more minute concerns of an American family caught in the social and political upheavals of the Belgian Congo in the 1960s.