Be careful what you let your children read. That may be one of the unintended lessons in Ed Viesturs’ thoroughly absorbing memoir about his 17-year campaign to climb the world’s 14 highest mountains, No Shortcuts to the Top.

Growing up outside Chicago in the early 1970s, Viesturs happened to read Maurice Herzog’s story of his 1950 ascent of Annapurna, the first 8,000-meter mountain ever climbed. After that, "I just felt that Illinois was not quite right for me," Viesturs says during a call to Bainbridge Island, Washington, where he lives with his wife, Paula, and their three young children.

In fact, nothing but the Himalaya would ultimately satisfy the questing urge inspired by that and other accounts of adventure Viesturs read as a youth. "For whatever reason, I like things that are difficult," he says, " things that are not only athletically challenging but that also make me really think about what I’m doing and how I’m doing it. Plus it’s just so beautiful up there, and the higher you go, the more spectacular it gets. You realize you are only one of a few people to be in these amazing places."

Viesturs is one of just 12 humans ever to have climbed all the world’s peaks over 8,000 meters high – all of them in the Himalaya – and one of only six people to do so without supplemental oxygen. As a guide, Viesturs also climbed many of these mountains using extra oxygen, which afforded him the stamina to assist client climbers. He has summited Everest six times and, as he vividly describes in the book, was on that mountain in 1996 as logistical organizer, lead climber and on-camera talent for the IMAX movie expedition when disaster struck.

Two of Viesturs’ friends and longtime climbing companions – Rob Hall and Scott Fischer (who was the photographer at Ed and Paula’s wedding) – were among those who died in the fierce storm on the mountain that year, despite the heroic efforts of Viesturs, the IMAX team and others to save them. In No Shortcuts to the Top and in conversation, Viesturs is characteristically modest about his selflessness in giving up scarce resources and even scarcer time to rescue other climbers. "I’ve always felt that if other people need your help, that is the priority," Viesturs says. "If I knew that I got to the summit but another climber didn’t make it because I didn’t stop and help, that would bother me to the end of my days." Viesturs writes movingly about sitting with the frozen bodies of his friends after the storm had passed.

In a conversational tone that is remarkably similar to his relaxed, candid speaking style, Viesturs, with co-author David Roberts, writes about both the physical and financial challenges of being a mountaineer (he was fanatical about training, but in the early years struggled without sponsorship to finance his climbing expeditions while working first as a veterinarian and then – because it offered a more flexible schedule – as a carpenter); about the stress his career put on his family ("Hopefully it comes out that I’m sensitive to other people’s feelings, and Paula’s in particular"); about the details of daily life during a climb (which included long periods of waiting for good conditions, so that Viesturs would "read 20 books on an expedition . . . everything from the latest Tom Clancy to the classics to books by other mountaineers"); and about the personalities of the mountains he has climbed and the companions he has climbed with.

Fittingly, Annapurna was the final and most dangerous mountain Viesturs climbed in his quest. One of the most disciplined and safety-conscious climbers of all time, he had twice turned back from Annapurna’s summit before finally reaching the top on May 12, 2005. "I’ve always felt if I didn’t fail because of my lack of desire or training, I was fine with turning back. It was the mountain that was calling the shots," Viesturs says. "You can’t conquer a mountain. By having the right attitude, by being humble and respectful, I was allowed to go up. And I was allowed to go down. You have to follow your instincts and budget your resources and just keep plowing through it. And you have to remember that getting to the top doesn’t prove anything. It’s getting back that shows you have strength and intelligence. Otherwise it doesn’t mean a thing."

Alden Mudge has trekked to Everest base camp at 18,500 feet.

" All stories, they say, begin in one of two ways: A stranger came to town,' or else, I set out upon a journey,'" writes novelist and essayist Barbara Kingsolver in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. The latter theme pervades her new memoir cum investigative nonfiction narrative, a faithful, funny and thought-provoking chronicle of a year in which the author and her family pulled up their big-city stakes and moved from Tucson, Arizona, to a farm in southwestern Virginia. The objective: to spend a year subsisting on food they would raise themselves, or purchase only from local sources, like farmers' markets.

"The project of taking this sort of sabbatical year really was something we had to do as a family," Kingsolver says, speaking from her Virginia farm. "I couldn't do it by myself. And we talked about it for years—it's not something we did overnight." Indeed, the experiment germinated a while; its roots are clearly visible in her essay, Lily's Chickens, (from the 2002 Small Wonder collection) in which she discusses the energy crime of American food transportation and the ethics of responsible eating.

Kingsolver's Appalachian adventure was her response to a conviction that America's food system has been kidnapped, that our nation's food production and consumption habits have been hijacked ("There are ingredients on food labels we can't even pronounce!" she exclaims). She observes that we are now a mostly urban society disconnected from the land the source of our sustenance. "To connect to it, we have to know what farmers do and how vegetables grow. It's a whole area of knowledge that has been lost from our culture in the last two generations," she says.

Contributing to this loss is America's reliance upon highly processed foods across all product lines, with foodstuffs routinely transported worldwide to satisfy our national cravings for any comestible, any time. "Americans put almost as much fossil fuel into our refrigerators as our cars," states Steven L. Hopp, Kingsolver's husband, in the book's first chapter.

As it turns out, this book has not one author, but three. It is a collaborative project that, Kingsolver admits, no one in the family saw coming. "The idea to make a book," she says, "had its genesis in practicality and generosity, a way to inform people about how small, individual lifestyle changes (such as buying food locally and cooking at home) can make a huge difference in quality of life."

And inform it does—accompanying Kingsolver's finely crafted, endearingly personal narrative are information-packed sidebars of no- nonsense prose by Hopp, a biologist. There are also delightful, earnest essays from her 19-year-old daughter, Camille, who comments on the whole adventure, nutritional issues and the sometimes embarrassing (sausage-making!) behaviors of parents. Rounding out this bi-generational perspective are family recipes and weekly meal plans (downloadable from the book's website, www.animalvegetable.com).

Readers—whether vegetarian or carnivore—will not go hungry, literally or literarily. Nor was the Kingsolver-Hopp clan famished during their year of cutting off the industrial pipeline and sinking into the local foodshed. Though Kingsolver reports that it was hard work cultivating the farm, and harvesting and storing the crops for use in the winter months, she says her family thrived on reconnecting with a bounteous earth and its cycles, and derived great pleasure from cooking and eating delicious meals. "This was a project that brought our family together," Kingsolver says.

This year of engaging with the land, of changing eating and purchasing habits, expanded a sense of plenty not scarcity. During our conversation, she reveals that there has been a tremendous interest in the book, even before its publication. And the question people repeatedly ask her is: What was the hardest thing to give up? This confounds Kingsolver, who feels that, in their year of eating consciously, they gained a sense of connection, awareness and fulfillment, and a gratitude for the earth's abundance and generosity. "We didn't drag through the year missing things," she says. "We had such a good time celebrating what we had and celebrating the seasons it's really such a lesson for life, isn't it?" One thing they did not eschew, however, was coffee. "We wheedled out of that one!" she laughs, explaining that they purchased only fair-trade java.

Though they handily solved the coffee conundrum, situations arose that were not so easily dealt with, such as harvesting their livestock for the table. Just before our interview, Kingsolver had been out checking on her animals. "We just had lambs born yesterday," she enthuses. One of the book's most powerful essays, You Can't Run Away on Harvest Day, rationally, but tenderly, discusses how humans kill other life forms from worms, butterflies and broccoli to cattle for sustenance.

"People do get emotional about killing animals, but less than five percent of the population is vegetarian, which means that 95 percent of us eat animals, and we know that somebody killed them," Kingsolver says firmly. She knows that humans don't want to think about this, and says that it's hard for her, too, even though she takes great care in raising and dispatching her animals in the most humane ways possible. "I am a very soft-hearted person," she admits, "and it's difficult to look your food in the eye and face the fact that someone had to kill it for you. But looking at it head-on allows you to make good decisions. Every book I've ever written is about something difficult I don't shrink from raising the difficult questions."

After all our discussion of flora and fauna, I realized I hadn't queried Kingsolver about the third element of her book's title. What, I asked her, was your particular miracle? "Realizing that I could change," she answers, "that I could joyfully embrace a simpler, more sustainable way to live. We can act sensibly, return to our local economies and have a different world. Whether or not people read this book, fossil fuels are going to run out. The dinosaurs are not going to lie down and make more oil."

Alison Hood tends her strawberry patch in sunny California.