High Tide in Tucson

High Tide in Tucson is a 1995 book of twenty-five essays by author Barbara Kingsolver on issues around family, community and ecology. The book is titled after the first essay, in which she realizes that a hermit crab she accidentally brought home while beachcombing still times its activity to the rise and fall of the tides, even in an aquarium in Tucson, Arizona where there are no oceans or tides for hundreds of miles. Some of the themes in the essay include the similarity and the relationship of humans with animals, and their proper places in nature.


The works of Barbara Kingsolver
  • The Bean Trees
  • Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983
  • Homeland and Other Stories
  • Animal Dreams
  • Another America
  • Pigs in Heaven
  • High Tide in Tucson
  • The Poisonwood Bible
  • Prodigal Summer
  • Small Wonder: Essays
  • Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands
  • Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver)
  • The Lacuna
  • Flight Behavior

Famous quotes containing the words high and/or tide:

    “Research shows clearly that parents who have modeled nurturant, reassuring responses to infants’ fears and distress by soothing words and stroking gentleness have toddlers who already can stroke a crying child’s hair. Toddlers whose special adults model kindliness will even pick up a cookie dropped from a peer’s high chair and return it to the crying peer rather than eat it themselves!”
    —Alice Sterling Honig (20th century)

    “There is a tide in the affairs of men
    Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
    Omitted, all the voyage of their life
    Is bound in shallows and in miseries.”
    —William Shakespeare (1564–1616)