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Hot Nonfiction: Two New Best Sellers with Northwest Appeal
by Lisa Albers

Richard Preston and Barbara Kingsolver have both had their turns at the best-seller list before — Preston for The Hot Zone, and Kingsolver for The Poisonwood Bible. Their latest books, which both made their way to the New York Times best-seller list this year, hold great appeal for Northwest readers. Richard Preston’s The Wild Trees tells of the exploration of the redwood forest canopy and the discoveries — both botanical and personal — made by the intrepid researchers who ascend to its heights. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life is Kingsolver’s narrative argument for becoming a ‘locavore’ — one who eats locally in order to enact change globally.

Richard Preston’s The Wild Trees is a gem. The worry with a project like this one is that Preston might find some way to sensationalize so hallowed a subject as the mystical redwoods of California. At least one reviewer accused him of such, but on the contrary, he practices considerable restraint, deftly weaving scientific and historical information about the redwoods into a narrative arc in which the main hero is the forest itself. The tension of the book comes from the band of ragtag researchers’ quests to uncover the mystery of the trees and the problems they confront along the way: How to safely ascend to the canopy; how to carry out expeditions in unmapped, often inhospitable territories with neither funding nor legitimacy; how to gauge global environmental health using the trees as barometers.

This is not to say that there aren’t heart-stopping moments, or that the book isn’t a page-turner. Reading about Preston’s subjects taking great liberties with their lives by flying around hundreds of feet in the air as if they were Spiderman would make any reader’s palms sweat, acrophobic or not.

But the story unfolds as the mysteries of the trees unfold; as the researchers scale what they had believed were the tallest trees in the world, they find them dwarfed by even greater giants, trees so tall they would reach more than halfway to the top of the Space Needle. They find whole ecosystems inhabiting the canopy: rare lichens, salamanders, even huckleberry bushes growing in soil at 300 feet. Preston reveals their discoveries with the pacing of a true storyteller:

At the time that Steve Sillet and Marwood Harris made the first ascent of Nameless, there was a general belief among biologists that the redwood forest canopy was what they called a redwood desert. That is, the redwood canopy was believed to be essentially empty of life other than the branches of redwood trees. In any case, biologists regarded coast redwood trees as unreachable towers, remote and bare. Steve Sillet encountered something quite different. He found what amounted to coral reefs in the air.

Unfortunately, perhaps, Preston tends to the shorter line as if too conscious of losing his audience, and his explanations might seem pedestrian for many readers: “Epiphytes feed on the moisture and nutrients in trees.” Readers will undoubtedly wonder why he seems inordinately preoccupied with tree-climbing gear, to the point of overemphasis, until the reason is disclosed toward the end of the book. Climbers will no doubt find the details fascinating, regardless. Preston manages to pay tribute to the trees and underscore a respect for them without sounding a single proselytizing note, so these quibbles pale in comparison to the overall achievement.

Barbara Kingsolver’s book is getting extreme exposure in the media, and it’s no wonder, since the idea of eating local foods and having an understanding of your dinner’s “chain of custody” is reaching its zenith. There’s even an experiment to rival the one that Kingsolver, her husband and two daughters undertook on their farm in Virginia. Originators of the “100-mile diet,” Canadians Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon wrote a book of the same name which was released by Random House last month (the U.S. version is called Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally). The 100-mile diet refers to Smith and Mackinnon only eating food that was produced within a 100-mile radius of their apartment in Vancouver, B.C. for a year.

Although they had similar motivations, Kingsolver and her family were less concerned with radius and more concerned with controlling the chain of custody — they wanted to grow, raise or otherwise produce most of their own food. This meant crossing the threshold that would hold back many an average citizen: They raised, then slaughtered their own turkeys for meat.

And this is where the book may fail to satisfy stringent Northwest foodies, especially those who lean toward vegetarianism. Kingsolver makes a strong — almost shrilly defensive — argument about why her family needs to kill for food (though she prefers the euphemism ‘harvest’). Perhaps the strongest argument is that there are many cultures that are dependent upon animals for sustenance because their environment cannot support a plant-based diet. Kingsolver quotes Kahlil Gibran and argues for dignity in her animals’ deaths.

However, the turkey slaughter seems anything but dignified: Kingsolver uses the image of her hand up a turkey’s hindquarters as an occasion to laugh at the idea that she is one of the most dangerous people in America (as a book published in 2005 claimed). The family uses dead turkey heads for puppets; she refers to both the turkeys and chickens as “stupid” and “brainless.”

Surely this is a desensitization tactic common to any who must live with the very animals that eventually wind up on the dinner table. However, it undermines the project and is emblematic of an absence of great writing —writing that stems from an appreciation for all things living—that might have made this a beautiful book, which it isn’t.

Case in point: The turkey sex chapter. A science writer with a greater sense of fascination for the rare privilege of witnessing turkey coupling when nearly 100 percent of the procreation of U.S. turkeys occurs at the business end of a syringe might have taken a more reverential tack, but Kingsolver reduces it to corny cliché: “They really did miss. Mwah! — like a pair of divas onstage who don’t want to muss their lipstick. (Not Britney and Madonna.)” And this: “She pecked listlessly at some grain on the floor. Probably she’d been hoping for better room service.”

Despite its flaws — and there are more — the book does present a powerful, compelling argument for buying local food, especially directly from farmers. At the very least, readers will not be able to shop at the grocery store without wondering where the bananas came from, when asparagus season begins and ends in their region, or what their own food carbon footprint looks like. And in this way, Kingsolver passes her own test. She is founder of the Bellwether Prize, which honors literature as a tool for social change, and this book will undoubtedly inspire home gardeners and locavores everywhere.

Lisa Albers is a Seattle poet and freelance writer.

©2007 Caliope Publishing Company