Blithe Tomato

By Mike Madison

Book Overview

Cultural Writing. Biography. Across America, people are escaping fluorescent-lit grocery store aisles to rediscover the fresh, seasonal offerings of the farmers' market. A new and thriving culture has... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1597140244
• ISBN13: 9781597140249
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: Heyday
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.5" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

My Favorite Book This Year

With beautiful writing, Mike Madison takes us behind the scenes of his farmers' market and unmasks the colorful personalities of the vendors and customers. He recounts the ideosyncratic lifestyle of today's small-scale farmer with great warmth and humor.

Explore the farm...

In good travel narratives readers submerse themselves into more detail than they could ever imagine. And sometimes the imagination far outweighs an often blurry, or myopic focus on a colorful TV show, or even from their own travels--yes, some people are not as adventurous as the books they read. A book like Blithe Tomato is not a travel narrative in the sense that the author is an outsider recording his take on a foreign country. There are no Yugoslavian travels, or dips into war-torn Iraq's out-of-balanced cityscapes. Yet Blithe Tomato is a journey that travels to foreign lands. Mike Madison's storytelling interconnects California's small farms with farmers' markets and the diverse people who make up a peculiar American culture of food. Madison takes you out of the city to the war-torn farmlands of California, where farmers often fight equally between natural landscapes of blights, weeds and gophers as well as against the machinery needed to toil large plots of land--all for a miniscule profit. And Madison brings a human side as well by describing people: people who hang in the balance of despair and success, who all traverse farmlands and farmer's markets in a shared existence that Madison politely observes.

A charmer!

I am only half-way through this book and I want so much to contact the author to say how much I am enjoying his book -- a series of short essays filled with Mike Madison's perceptive observations of human behavior, much of it found at the farmers' market at which he sells his produce. He lovingly describes the people he meets, his philosophical meanderings, and his work at the farm. He has a wonderful way with words. Here is one of my favorite passages from a chapter titled "Jeepers, Creepers": "The human mind is a curious thing. When we are thinking normally, our thoughts seem to proceed deliberately, if not majestically, along a straight avenue, with vistas left and right down intersecting mental boulevards, in a way that would have made Descartes happy. But this is a small minority of the time. More often our thoughts scamper across the rooftops, slide down a drain pipe, duck in an open window, emerge moments later from a distant doorway wearing an odd hat, and disappear round a corner down an alley. Occasionally we get a glimpse of this mental pathway, too."

A Powerful Book-Read it NOW

Michael Madison addresses many the issues facing us today as humans while he navigates the farm and farmers markets. Could be the (god forbid) new Peter Mayles of the United States and turns the area he is from a new tourist destination! I certainly want to run to his farmers market. Blithe Tomato took me out of my life for a day!!!Loved it!!

Fresh look at Farmers' Market Growers

Run, do not walk, to your nearest bookseller to buy Blithe Tomato. With a quick wit, insight, and sense of humor Mike Madison weaves stories of unique farm personalities and gives us a personal peek into his own life. Buy three books; they're great gifts.