It's happened again, not far from where I live: children fighting with one another, resulting in a death. I'd call it a deliberate death, considering it came from a beating with a baseball bat. I don't care what the provocation or the stakes; it doesn't even matter that "it's only a game!" The sadness is the same whether the cause is war over territory, resources, religious fervor, political disputes, ideological endeavors, or a grain of rice.

Barbara Kingsolver addresses such an issue, and many more, in her recent Small Wonder. Echoes of a mother, a daughter, a homemaker, a woman, a world citizen reverberate through this collection of millennial essays.

Kingsolver's strengths include reducing complex geopolitical problems to everyday comprehension. She finds universal application for commonplace occurrences without trivializing the important issues pricking our collective consciences. "To see the world in a grain of sand," indeed! Just one example: from contemplating planting Columbine flowers, she ranges past the shootings at the Colorado school with the same name to global warfare and back again to advocate Americans stop glorifying violence as a solution and begin acknowledging to our children that our past choices for settling disputes are now intolerable.

Mothers may reverberate with echoes from "Another Mother for Peace" from the sixties and "Beyond War" in the eighties. Most of the battles Kingsolver wages have gone on for decades, and she proves a tireless warrior.
© 2005 Georganna Hancock