The Right Book at the Right Time

Title: Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit

Author: Barry Estabrook

Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing, June 2011

Summary: As an avid home cook, with a bent toward vegetarian and Italian food, this book was a real eye-opener about the principle ingredient in many of my dishes:  the tomato.

   Barry Estabrook researches the subject with a reporter’s eye as he travels the southern United States, particularly southern Florida, investigating exactly how corporate agribusiness (I’m am NOT saying that they are a Great Satan by any means, as corporate farms produce an enormous amount of food at very reasonable prices) has taken over the “slicing” tomato, as opposed to the canned or juice tomato, business in the United States. He explains that the genetic background of the tomato is actually an arid-landscape, don’t-water-me-too-much plant, which could not be further out of its element than in South Florida, where there is sandy soil and far too much humidity for the fruit we remember as a vine-ripened tomato. There are some bright spots in his research, such as organic and small scale farmers who grow a dizzying variety of tomatoes, only in season and only harvested at their peak of perfect ripeness.

   Just as in Fast Food Nation and classics like The Jungle, the inhuman conditions, abject poverty and actual slavery, in the U.S. tomato picking and farming industry is graphically exposed.

   He goes on to describe the extensive chemical fertilizer and pesticide use which is required to create the unnatural per-acre yield required to farm tomatoes in such a concentrated fashion. He concludes that the exalted culinary position of the slicing tomato, that jewel of almost every home gardener and farmer’s market, has largely been  co-opted by a rock-hard, chemically-and-genetically-altered, unnaturally inexpensive commodity that can be produced in soil not at all conducive to its growth, shipped in its greenest, hardest state without so much as a bruise, gassed with ethylene to force at least a pale pink or orange hue and sold to fast food chains and in your local supermarket all year long at very low prices, as long as you don’t care what it looks like, tastes like, and don’t bother to check its all-but-non-existent nutritional value.

Who Might Like This?: Anyone interested in cooking, eating, or feeding others.

Recommended by: Mark Z., Guest Reviewer

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Title: A Northern Light

Author: Jennifer Donnelly

Summary: Unlike many girls in the Great North Woods at the turn of the century, Mattie Gokey is gifted: She is a writer so talented she has been offered a full scholarship to Barnard College. But how can she leave? Since her mamma died, it has been Mattie’s job to run the farmhouse and look after her sisters, neighbors and her gruff pa. To earn money for the family, Mattie goes to work at the Glenmore Hotel. One day she is handed a bundle of letters by a guest named Grace, who asks her to burn them. Hours later, Grace’s body is found in the lake, and the boyfriend who took her out rowing is nowhere to be found. As Mattie begins to read the letters and piece together the mystery, she also begins to answer the questions of her own life: Should she stay and marry her gorgeous neighbor Royal, who doesn’t understand her love of books and words, or take her chances in New York and chase her dream of becoming a writer?  

The book is based on a real murder case that was the basis for the classic novel An American Tragedy and the film A Place in the Sun. But it is the fictional Mattie’s struggle to define herself in an era where girls had so few choices and little say in their futures that will linger long after the final page has been turned.

Who will like this book?: People who like fiction based on true stories. Fans of authentic characters with a lot of depth and honesty.

If you like this, try this: An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser. For another unforgettable, beautifully written historical novel featuring a book-loving heroine, try The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.

Recommended by: Nicole, Teen Librarian

Title: Mudbound

Author: Hillary Jordan

Summary: Halfway into Hillary Jordan’s debut novel, Mudbound, I knew that she had earned a place on my “Must Read Authors” list. This is a wonderful, beautiful, brutal, tragic, richly painted novel that is worthy of all of its high praise.

It’s the Mississippi Delta in the 1940’s. The story opens as Henry and his brother Jamie are trying desperately to bury the body of a man, their father. Slowly, the reader is drawn into the lives of the six people who set in motion the events that lead to this man’s death. Laura and Henry McCallan are struggling with day-to-day life on a farm; Hap and Florence Jackson, the black sharecroppers who live and work on the McCallans’ farm, must deal with racism and the unforgiving conditions of the labor they face every day. Each family awaits the return of a war hero, and each family is brought to its knees as their wounded veterans come home and try to resume a “normal” life.

Before it was even published, Mudbound was the winner of a literary prize, the Bellwether Prize for Fiction. Barbara Kingsolver, the founder of the award, had this to say of Hillary Jordan: “her characters walked straight out of 1940’s Mississippi and into the part of my brain where sympathy and anger and love reside, leaving my heart racing. They are still with me.”

And they are still with me as well.

Recommended by: Mary, Reference Librarian