Welcome to our new series in which we ask women who rock our worlds to recommend books that rocked their world. Every week we will bring you a book that every woman should read.
Kirtana Kumar is a Bangalore-based actor, director and farmer with one husband, one daughter and four dogs. When we asked her to recommend a book she first said, “Jeez…Is there such a thing anymore?” Eventually, she came to this tasty suggestion:
“Figuring all women reading this column have read every damn book they ‘should’ have, including Camille Paglia’s Sex and Violence, Or Nature and Art, here is my humble offering.”
“Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. If women are indeed the motivators of political change inspired by personal experience, then this beautiful book is an anthem for our cynical times. Combining lived experience with solid analysis of the fallout of capitalism on the most intimate aspects of our lives (the way we eat, love and live) it offers renewed hope and idealism. Following the year that Kingsolver spent with her family, actually growing all their own food, the narrative is interspersed with partner Steven L.Hopp’s reportage on the commercial food industry and her young daughter Camille’s approach to cooking. Placing the kitchen, in new and refreshing ways, at the heart of the family, it ends up being a surprisingly poetic read about the polemics of modern life.
Haters will hate, but a delicious read about Enid Blyton-esque farm life with recipes for stuff like 30-minute Mozarella and Frida Kahlo’s Pan de Muerto is just what my post-modern doctor ordered.”
Image credit: Pallavi Arun