conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide a description for a book titled The Poisonwood Bible about Nathan, Nathan's, Oprah with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Oprah Book Club Selection, June 2000: As any reader of The Mosquito Coast knows, men who drag their families to far-off climes in pursuit of an Idea seldom come to any good, while those familiar with At Play in the Fields of the Lord or Kalimantaan understand that the minute a missionary sets foot on the fictional stage, all hell is about to break loose. So when the author sends missionary Nathan Price along with his wife and four daughters off to Africa in The Poisonwood Bible , you can be sure that salvation is the one thing they're not likely to find. The year is 1959 and the place is the Belgian Congo. Nathan, a Baptist preacher, has come to spread the Word in a remote village reachable only by airplane. To say that he and his family are woefully unprepared would be an understatement: "We came from Bethlehem, Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle," says Leah, one of Nathan's daughters. But of course it isn't long before they discover that the tremendous humidity has rendered the mixes unusable, their clothes are unsuitable, and they've arrived in the middle of political upheaval as the Congolese seek to wrest independence from Belgium. In addition to poisonous snakes, dangerous animals, and the hostility of the villagers to Nathan's fiery take-no-prisoners brand of Christianity, there are also rebels in the jungle and the threat of war in the air. Could things get any worse?
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Poisonwood Bible
  Soon I returned to the United States and the routine of multiplication tables in a third-grade classroom instead of a jungle, and when we wrote about "What I Did Last Summer," I fudged it. I left out the spitting cobra on the doorstep and the idea of monkey as cuisine, opting to describe my grandmother's house. Anybody who really remembers third grade can recall certain unfortunate children being called names like "Cobra-head" and "Monkey-eater:' if not those things exactly. You get the picture. But the Congo remained an important place in my memory. In the sixties it was renamed Zaire. As I got older I continued to follow its current events, in the way you might keep up with news of a place from which you'd once had relatives or a foreign exchange student. My interest was personal, rather than academic.
  And so it came to pass that what once resembled Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous nightmare has pretty much turned out to be a novelist's dream come true. I made of it what I wanted. I hope it has meant something to you. Though I'm finished with it, I'm glad to know it's still out in the world (e.g., Romania!) doing its work. Finally, I'm happy the writing is behind me, rather than still looming out ahead. She grew up "in the middle of an alfalfa field," in the part of eastern Kentucky that lies between the opulent horse farms and the impoverished coal fields. She has always been a storyteller. As a child, she wrote stories and essays and, beginning at the age of eight, kept a journal religiously. Still, it never occurred to Kingsolver that she could become a professional writer. For Barbara, growing up in a rural place, where work centered mainly on survival, writing didn't seem to be a practical career choice. Besides, the writers she read, she once explained, "were mostly old, dead men from England. It was inconceivable that I might grow up to be one of those myself'
  Kingsolver left Kentucky to attend DePauw University in Indiana, where she majored in biology. In the early eighties, she pursued graduate studies in biology and ecology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she received a master of science.
  Kingsolver's fiction is rich with the language and imagery of her native Kentucky. But when she first left home, she says, "I lost my accent.... [People made terrible fun of me for the way I used to talk, so I gave it up slowly and became something else."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about BARBARA, KINGSOLVER, April.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Poisonwood Bible
  Soon I returned to the United States and the routine of multiplication tables in a third-grade classroom instead of a jungle, and when we wrote about "What I Did Last Summer," I fudged it. I left out the spitting cobra on the doorstep and the idea of monkey as cuisine, opting to describe my grandmother's house. Anybody who really remembers third grade can recall certain unfortunate children being called names like "Cobra-head" and "Monkey-eater:' if not those things exactly. You get the picture. But the Congo remained an important place in my memory. In the sixties it was renamed Zaire. As I got older I continued to follow its current events, in the way you might keep up with news of a place from which you'd once had relatives or a foreign exchange student. My interest was personal, rather than academic. 
  And so it came to pass that what once resembled Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous nightmare has pretty much turned out to be a novelist's dream come true. I made of it what I wanted. I hope it has meant something to you. Though I'm finished with it, I'm glad to know it's still out in the world (e. g. , Romania!) doing its work. Finally, I'm happy the writing is behind me, rather than still looming out ahead. 
  BARBARA KINGSOLVER was born on April 8, 1955. She grew up "in the middle of an alfalfa field," in the part of eastern Kentucky that lies between the opulent horse farms and the impoverished coal fields. She has always been a storyteller. As a child, she wrote stories and essays and, beginning at the age of eight, kept a journal religiously. Still, it never occurred to Kingsolver that she could become a professional writer. For Barbara, growing up in a rural place, where work centered mainly on survival, writing didn't seem to be a practical career choice. Besides, the writers she read, she once explained, "were mostly old, dead men from England. It was inconceivable that I might grow up to be one of those myself'
  Kingsolver left Kentucky to attend DePauw University in Indiana, where she majored in biology. In the early eighties, she pursued graduate studies in biology and ecology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she received a master of science. 
  Kingsolver's fiction is rich with the language and imagery of her native Kentucky. But when she first left home, she says, "I lost my accent.... [People made terrible fun of me for the way I used to talk, so I gave it up slowly and became something else. "
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide five more paragraphs.. Start with the sentence 'And so it came to pass that what once resembled Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous nightmare has pretty much turned out to be a novelist's dream come true'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: And so it came to pass that what once resembled Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous nightmare has pretty much turned out to be a novelist's dream come true. I made of it what I wanted. I hope it has meant something to you. Though I'm finished with it, I'm glad to know it's still out in the world (e.g., Romania!) doing its work. Finally, I'm happy the writing is behind me, rather than still looming out ahead.
  BARBARA KINGSOLVER was born on April 8, 1955. She grew up "in the middle of an alfalfa field," in the part of eastern Kentucky that lies between the opulent horse farms and the impoverished coal fields. She has always been a storyteller. As a child, she wrote stories and essays and, beginning at the age of eight, kept a journal religiously. Still, it never occurred to Kingsolver that she could become a professional writer. For Barbara, growing up in a rural place, where work centered mainly on survival, writing didn't seem to be a practical career choice. Besides, the writers she read, she once explained, "were mostly old, dead men from England. It was inconceivable that I might grow up to be one of those myself'
  Kingsolver left Kentucky to attend DePauw University in Indiana, where she majored in biology. In the early eighties, she pursued graduate studies in biology and ecology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she received a master of science.
  Kingsolver's fiction is rich with the language and imagery of her native Kentucky. But when she first left home, she says, "I lost my accent.... [People made terrible fun of me for the way I used to talk, so I gave it up slowly and became something else."
  Barbara Kingsolver lives in Virginia with her husband, Steven Hopp, and their two daughters, Camille (born in 1987) and Lily (born in 1996). When not writing, Kingsolver gardens, cooks, and enjoys the outdoors with her family; works as an environmental activist and human-rights advocate; and plays hand drums and keyboard with her guitarist husband.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Kingsolver's most recent novel is a hymn to wildness that celebrates the prodigal spirit of human nature, and of nature itself. It weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives amid the mountains and farms of southern Appalachia. Over the course of one humid summer, this novel's intriguing protagonists face disparate predicaments but find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a place.
  A modern classic, Kingsolver's first novel is a memorable exploration of the American Southwest. It is the story of Taylor Greer, a rural Kentucky girl who grew up poor with only two goals: to avoid pregnancy and to get away. She succeeds on both counts, buys a '55 Volkswagen, and heads west. But by the time she pulls up on the outskirts of Tuscon, Arizona, at an auto repair shop called Jesus Is Lord Used Tires, she's "inherited" a three year-old American Indian girl named Turtle. What follows is at the heart of this unforgettable novel about love and friendship, abandonment and belonging, and the discovery of surprising resources in apparently empty places.
  With the eyes of a scientist and the vision of a poet, Kingsolver offers twenty-five essays on the urgent business of being alive in tiIe world today. "Our highest shopping goal was to get our food from so close to home, we'd know the person who grew it. Often that turned out to be ourselves as we learned to produce what we needed, starting with dirt, seeds, and enough knowledge to muddle through. Or starting with baby animals, and enough sense to refrain from naming them."
  Animal, Vegetable, Miracle follows the family through the first year of their experiment. They find themselves eager to move away from the typical food scenario of American families: a refrigerator packed with processed, factory-farmed foods transported long distances using nonrenewable fuels. In their search for another way to eat and live, they begin to recover what Kingsolver considers our nation's lost appreciation for farms and the natural processes of food production. American citizens spend less of their income on food than has any culture in the history of the world, but pay dearly in other ways-losing the flavors, diversity, and creative food cultures of earlier times. The environmental costs are also high, and the nutritional sacrifice is undeniable: on our modern industrial food supply, Americans are now raising the first generation of children to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about Barbara, Kingsolver, Arizona, produced, paying.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Kingsolver's most recent novel is a hymn to wildness that celebrates the prodigal spirit of human nature, and of nature itself. It weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives amid the mountains and farms of southern Appalachia. Over the course of one humid summer, this novel's intriguing protagonists face disparate predicaments but find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a place. 
  A modern classic, Kingsolver's first novel is a memorable exploration of the American Southwest. It is the story of Taylor Greer, a rural Kentucky girl who grew up poor with only two goals: to avoid pregnancy and to get away. She succeeds on both counts, buys a '55 Volkswagen, and heads west. But by the time she pulls up on the outskirts of Tuscon, Arizona, at an auto repair shop called Jesus Is Lord Used Tires, she's "inherited" a three year-old American Indian girl named Turtle. What follows is at the heart of this unforgettable novel about love and friendship, abandonment and belonging, and the discovery of surprising resources in apparently empty places. 
  With the eyes of a scientist and the vision of a poet, Kingsolver offers twenty-five essays on the urgent business of being alive in tiIe world today. 
  When Barbara Kingsolver and her family move from suburban Arizona to rural Appalachia, they take on a new challenge: to spend a year on a locally produced diet, paying close attention to the provenance of all they consume. "Our highest shopping goal was to get our food from so close to home, we'd know the person who grew it. Often that turned out to be ourselves as we learned to produce what we needed, starting with dirt, seeds, and enough knowledge to muddle through. Or starting with baby animals, and enough sense to refrain from naming them. "
  Animal, Vegetable, Miracle follows the family through the first year of their experiment. They find themselves eager to move away from the typical food scenario of American families: a refrigerator packed with processed, factory-farmed foods transported long distances using nonrenewable fuels. In their search for another way to eat and live, they begin to recover what Kingsolver considers our nation's lost appreciation for farms and the natural processes of food production. American citizens spend less of their income on food than has any culture in the history of the world, but pay dearly in other ways-losing the flavors, diversity, and creative food cultures of earlier times. The environmental costs are also high, and the nutritional sacrifice is undeniable: on our modern industrial food supply, Americans are now raising the first generation of children to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.