{"product_id":"the-good-good-pig-isbn-9780345496096","title":"The Good Good Pig","description":"\u003cb\u003e\"In loving yet unsentimental prose, Sy Montgomery captures the richness that animals bring to the human experience. Sometimes it takes a too-smart-for-his-own-good pig to open our eyes to what most matters in life.”\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—John Grogan, author of \u003ci\u003eMarley \u0026amp; Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA naturalist  who spent months at a time living on her own among wild creatures in remote jungles,  Sy Montgomery had always felt more comfortable with animals than with people. So  she gladly opened her heart to a sick piglet who had been crowded away from nourishing  meals by his stronger siblings. Yet Sy had no inkling that this piglet, later named  Christopher Hogwood, would not only survive but flourish—and she soon found herself  engaged with her small-town community in ways she had never dreamed possible. Unexpectedly,  Christopher provided this peripatetic traveler with something she had sought all  her life: an anchor (eventually weighing 750 pounds) to family and home.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe Good  Good Pig\u003c\/i\u003e celebrates Christopher Hogwood in all his glory, from his inauspicious infancy  to hog heaven in rural New Hampshire, where his boundless zest for life and his large,  loving heart made him absolute monarch over a (mostly) peaceable kingdom. At first,  his domain included only Sy’s cosseted hens and her beautiful border collie, Tess.  Then the neighbors began fetching Christopher home from his unauthorized jaunts,  the little girls next door started giving him warm, soapy baths, and the villagers  brought him delicious leftovers. His intelligence and fame increased along with his  girth. He was featured in \u003ci\u003eUSA Today \u003c\/i\u003eand on several National Public Radio environmental  programs. On election day, some voters even wrote in Christopher’s name on their  ballots.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e But as this enchanting book describes, Christopher Hogwood’s influence  extended far beyond celebrity; for he was, as a friend said, a great big Buddha master.  Sy reveals what she and others learned from this generous soul who just so happened  to be a pig—lessons about self-acceptance, the meaning of family, the value of community,  and the pleasures of the sweet green Earth. \u003ci\u003eThe Good Good Pig\u003c\/i\u003e provides proof that  with love, almost anything is possible.“I wasn’t sure what to  expect when I picked up Sy Montgomery’s story of Christopher the pig. What I found  was a charming, touching, funny, and ultimately very powerful tale of an extraordinary,  even complicated pig and his impact on some very loving, perceptive, and extraordinary  people. This story is heartwarming but packs a wallop.”\u003cbr\u003e —Jon Katz, author of \u003ci\u003eKatz  on Dogs \u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “I love this book! It takes us into the world of one pig with such delicacy,  such gentleness and yet such depth, that you will never be able to look a pig in  the eye again without recognizing the unique person living within. You become somebody  who sees why Sy Montgomery loved a pig beyond all measure.”\u003cbr\u003e —Jeffrey Masson, Ph.D.,  author of \u003ci\u003eWhen Elephants Weep\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Move over, Wilbur, there’s a new pig on the block.  Sy Montgomery has conjured a pure classic for the animal lover’s soul. Poetic, insightful,  funny, and deeply moving, \u003ci\u003eThe Good Good Pig \u003c\/i\u003eis as hard to define as it is to put  down. Who else but Sy Montgomery could introduce you to a hog and give you a such  glimpse of heaven?”\u003cbr\u003e —Vicki Croke, author of\u003ci\u003e The Lady and the Panda\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e“This is a book not so much about a barnyard animal as about relationships, in all their messy, joyous, and heartbreaking complexity. In loving yet unsentimental prose, Sy Montgomery captures the richness that animals bring to the human experience. Sometimes it takes a too-smart-for-his-own-good pig to open our eyes to what most matters in life. \u003ci\u003eThe Good Good Pig\u003c\/i\u003e is a good, good book, beautifully rendered and filled with wondrous surprises.”\u003cbr\u003e—John Grogan, author of \u003ci\u003eMarley \u0026amp; Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog\u003c\/i\u003eSy Montgomery is a naturalist, author, documentary scriptwriter, and radio commentator who writes for children as well as adults. Among her award-winning books are Journey of the Pink Dolphins, Spell of the Tiger, and Search for the Golden Moon Bear. She has made four trips to Peru and Brazil to study the pink dolphins of the Amazon; and on other expeditions, she was chased by an angry silverback gorilla in Zaire; bitten by a vampire bat in Costa Rica; undressed by an orangutan in Borneo; and hunted by a tiger in India. She also worked in a pit crawling with eighteen thousand snakes in Manitoba; handled a wild tarantula in French Guiana; and swam with piranhas, electric eels, and dolphins in the Amazon. She lives in New Hampshire.Chapter 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Runthood\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      Christopher Hogwood came home on my lap in a shoe box.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    On a rain-drenched April evening, so cold the frogs were silent, so gray  we could hardly see our barn, my husband drove our rusting Subaru over mud  roads sodden with melted snow. Pig manure caked on our boots. The smell of  a sick animal hung heavy in our clothes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It did not seem an auspicious time to make the life-  changing choice of adopting a pig.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    That whole spring, in fact, had been terrible. My father, an Army general,  a hero I so adored that I had confessed in Sunday school that I loved him  more than Jesus, was dying painfully, gruesomely of lung cancer. He had  survived the Bataan Death March. He had survived three years of Japanese  prison camps. In the last months of my father’s life, my glamorous,  slender mother—still as crazy about him as the day they’d met forty years  before—resisted getting a chairlift, a wheelchair, a hospice nurse. She  believed he could survive anything. But he could not survive this.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The only child, I had flown back and forth from New Hampshire to Virginia  to be with my parents whenever I could. I would return to New Hampshire  from these wrenching trips to try to finish my first book, a tribute to my  heroines, primatologists Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikas.  The research had been challenging: I had been charged by an angry  silverback gorilla in Zaire, stood up by Jane Goodall in Tanzania,  undressed by an orangutan in Borneo, and accosted for money by a  gun-toting guard ten thousand feet up the side of a volcano in Rwanda. Now  I was on a tight deadline, and the words wouldn’t come.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My husband, who writes on American history and preservation, was in the  heat of writing his second book. In the Memory House is about time and  change in New England, set largely in our corner of the world. But it  looked like it might not stay ours for long. For the past three years,  ever since our marriage, we had lived, first as renters and then as  caretakers, in an idyllic, 110-year-old white clapboard farmhouse on eight  acres in southern New Hampshire, near mountains that Thoreau had climbed.  Ours was the newest house in our   small neighborhood. Though our neighbors owned the two-  hundred-year-old “antiques” that real estate agents praised, this place  had everything I’d ever wanted: a fenced pasture, a wooded brook, a  three-level barn, and forty-year-old lilacs framing the front door. But it  was about to be sold out from under us. Our landlords, writer-artist  friends our age whose parents had bankrolled the house, had moved to Paris  and   didn’t plan to come back. We were desperate to buy the place. But because  we were both freelance writers, our income was deemed too erratic to merit  the mortgage.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It seemed I was about to lose my father, my book, and my home.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But for Christopher Hogwood, the spring had been more terrible yet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He had been born in mid-February, on a farm owned by George and Mary  Iselin, about a thirty-five-minute drive from our house. We knew George  and Mary by way of my best friend, Gretchen Vogel. Gretchen knew we had a  lot in common. “You’ll love them,” Gretchen had assured me. “They have  pigs!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In fact, George had been raising pigs longer than Mary had known him. “If  you’re a farmer or a hippie,” George had reasoned, “you can make money  raising pigs.” George and Mary were quintessential hippie farmers: born,  as we were, in the 1950s, they lived the ideals of the late ’60s and early  ’70s—peace, joy, and love—and, both blessed with radiant blue eyes, blond  hair, and good looks, always looked like they had just woken up refreshed  from sleeping in a pile of leaves somewhere, perhaps with elves in  attendance. They were dedicated back-to-the-landers who lived out of their  garden and made their own mayonnaise out of eggs from their free-range  hens. They were idealistic, but resourceful, too: it did not escape them  that there are vast quantities of free pig food out there, from bakeries,  school cafeterias, grocery stores, and factory outlets. George and Mary  would get a call to come pick up forty pounds of potato chips or a  truckload of Twinkies. To their dismay, they discovered their kids, raised  on homemade, organic meals, would sometimes sneak down to the barn at   4 a.m. and eat the junk food they got for the pigs. (“We found out because  in the morning we’d find these chocolate rings around their mouths,” Mary  told me.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    On their shaggy, overgrown 165 acres, they cut their own firewood, hayed  the fields, and raised not only pigs but draft horses, rabbits, ducks,  chickens, goats, sheep, and children. But the pigs, I suspect, were  George’s favorites. And they were mine, too.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    We visited them every spring. We didn’t get to see George and Mary  often—our schedules and lives were so different—but the baby pigs ensured  we never lost touch. The last time we’d visited was the previous March, at  the close of sugaring season, when George was out boiling sap from their  sugar maples. March in New Hampshire is the dawn of mud season, and the  place looked particularly disheveled. Rusting farm machinery sat stalled,  in various states of repair and disrepair, among the mud and wire fencing  and melting snow. Colorful, fraying laundry was strung across the front  porch like Tibetan prayer flags. Inside the house, an old cottage in  desperate need of paint, the floors were coming up and the ceilings were  coming down. Late that morning, in a kitchen steamy from the kettle  boiling on the woodstove, we found a seemingly uncountable number of small  children in flannel pajamas—their three kids plus a number of cousins and  visiting friends—sprawled across plates of unfinished pancakes or crawling  stickily across the floor. The sink was piled with dirty dishes. As Mary  reached for a mug from the pile, she mentioned everyone was just getting  over the flu. Would we like a cup of tea?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    No thanks, Howard and I answered hastily—but we would like to see the pigs  again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The barn was not Norman Rockwell. It was more like Norman Rockwell meets  Edward Hopper. The siding was ancient, the sills rotting, the interior  cavernous and furry with cobwebs. We loved it. We would peer over the tall  stall doors, our eyes adjusting to the gloom, and find the stalls with  piglets in residence. Once we had located a family, we would climb in and  play with them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    On some farms, this would be a dangerous proposition. Sows can weigh over  five hundred pounds and can snap if they feel their piglets are  threatened. The massive jaws can effortlessly crush a peach pit—or a  kneecap. The razor-sharp canines strop each other. And for good reason: In  the wild, pigs need to be strong and brave. In his hunting days in Brazil,  President Theodore Roosevelt once saw a jaguar dismembered   by South American native pigs. Although pigs are generally good-natured,  more people are killed each year by pigs than by sharks. (Which should be  no surprise—how often do you get to see a shark?) Pigs raised on crowded  factory farms, tortured into insanity, have been known to eat anything  that falls into the pigpen, including the occasional child whose parents  are foolish enough to let their kid wander into such a place unsupervised.  Feral pigs (of which there are more than four million running around in  the United States alone) can kill adult humans if they are threatened.  That pigs occasionally eat people has always struck me as only fair,  considering the far vaster number of pigs eaten by humans.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But George’s sows were all sweethearts. When we entered a stall, the sow,  lying on her side to facilitate nursing, would usually raise her giant,  150-pound head, cast us a benign   glance from one intelligent, lash-fringed eye, flex her wondrous and wet  nose disk to capture our scent, and utter a grunt of greeting. The piglets  were adorable miniatures of their behemoth parents—some pink, some black,  some red, some spotted, and some with handsome racing stripes, like baby  wild boars, looking like very large chipmunks. At first the piglets seemed  unsure whether they should try to eat us or run away. They would rush at  us in a herd, squealing, then race back on tiny, high-heeled hooves to  their giant, supine mother for another tug on her milky teats. And then  they would charge forth again, growing bold enough to chew on shoes or  untie laces. Many of the folks who bought a pig from George would later  make a point of telling him what a great pig it was. Even though the  babies were almost all destined for the freezer, the folks who bought them  seldom mentioned what these pigs tasted like as hams or chops or sausage.  No, the people would always comment that George’s were particularly nice  pigs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The year Chris was born was a record one for piglets. Because we were  beset and frantic, we didn’t visit the barn that February or March. But  that year, unknown to us, George and Mary had twenty sows—more than ever  before—and almost all of them had record litters.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Usually a sow doesn’t want to raise more than ten piglets,” Mary  explained to me. “Usually a sow has ten good working teats.” (They  actually have twelve, but only ten are usually in working order.) When a  sow has more than ten piglets, somebody is going to lose out—and that  somebody is the runt.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A runt is distinguished not only by its small size and helpless  predicament. Unless pulled from the litter and nursed by people, a runt is  usually doomed, for it is a threat to the entire pig family. “A runt will  make this awful sound—Nynh! Nynh! Nynh!” Mary told me. “It’s just awful.  It would attract predators. So the sow’s response is often to bite the  runt in half, to stop the noise. But sometimes she can’t tell who’s doing  it. She might bite a healthy one, or trample some of the others trying to  get to the runt. It isn’t her fault, and you can’t blame her. It screws up  the whole litter.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Every year on the farm, there was a runt or two. George would usually  remove the little fellow and bottle-feed it goat milk in the house. With  such personalized care, the runt will usually survive. But the class of  1990, with more than two hundred piglets, had no fewer than eighteen  runts—so many that George and Mary had to establish a “runt stall” in the  barn.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Christopher Hogwood was a runt among runts. He was the smallest of them  all—half the size of the other runts. He is a particularly endearing  piglet, Mary told us, with enormous ears and black and white spots, and a  black patch over one eye like Spuds McKenzie, the bull terrier in the beer  commercial. But Mary was convinced he would never survive. It would be  more humane to kill him, she urged, than to let him suffer. But George  said—as he often does—“Where there’s life, there’s hope.” The little  piglet hung on.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But he didn’t grow.[quote]--John Grogan, author of Marley \u0026amp; Me National bestseller","brand":"Ballantine Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299756691685,"sku":"NP9780345496096","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345496096.jpg?v=1767739590","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-good-good-pig-isbn-9780345496096","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}