Ginseng roots A memoir

Thompson revisits the setting of his Eisner-winning graphic novel Blankets in this bighearted examination of ginseng farming in rural Wisconsin. Growing up in Marathon, Wis. (population "barely 1,200"), Thompson worked alongside his siblings on nearby ginseng farms. Rising early to weed and pick rocks under a haze of pesticides, at age 10 he earned a dollar an hour, which he used to buy comic books--thus cultivating a passion that would provide his ticket out of his working-class, fundamentalist Christian upbringing. Fast forward to decades later, when Thompson, now a celebrated graphic novelist, encounters ginseng again while treating an aggressive fibromatosis plaguing his drawing hand. He begins asking questions about the herb, a mainstay of Eastern traditional medicine that grows prodigiously in Wisconsin. He interviews farmers he worked for as a kid, the president of a multinational ginseng concern (who vows to "Make American ginseng great again" in a speech), Hmong growers, and his own parents, gathering family histories while discussing America's shift toward industrialized agriculture. These conversations reveal subtle class divides, but also shared values tied to duty and family. As Thompson roves from the Wisconsin Ginseng Festival to a Korean wholesale auction and wild ginseng boutiques in China, his supple, brushy ink lines render the scenes in poignant detail. A feat of generous observation, this stands with Thompson's very best work. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Apr.)

Bestselling Eisner Award winner Thompson (Blankets) offers an introspective examination of his childhood in rural Wisconsin, exploring his family's experiences working in the ginseng industry, a demanding yet humble line of work that profoundly shaped his upbringing. Beyond the book's memoir aspects, Thompson also delves into the global history of ginseng, exploring its significance in Chinese culture and its economic role in shaping rural American communities. Thompson's detailed, delicate art captures both the intimacy of family life and the broader implications of labor, exploitation, and the interconnectedness of cultures, contrasting the simplicity of small-town life with the complexities of global trade and showing how a humble plant can create deep ties between distant parts of the world. VERDICT Thompson fuses lyrical reflections on his childhood with a thoughtful exploration of economic and cultural exchange to create a poignant meditation on labor, family, and the many ways in which global and personal endeavors intertwine, often unexpectedly. A visually rich, emotionally resonant work of true ambition and sophistication from one of the most sensitive storytellers currently working in any medium or genre.

A noted graphic novelist explores the complex story of ginseng, the medicinal root with an oddly humanlike shape. Ginseng is "prized in Chinese medicine," Thompson writes, but it is also grown in the perhaps unlikely confines of rural Wisconsin, where he grew up. Put to work harvesting ginseng as a child, Thompson recounts, he dreamed of doing something different, "the fantasy of a career path that could transcend our economic class." That "different" path involved writing comic books and, in time, graphic novels, rejecting his parents' fundamentalist Christianity and forsaking the countryside for downtown Portland, Oregon. Yet, for all the slugs and mosquitoes, the scorching heat and freezing cold, and the endless labor of harvesting the stuff, Thompson, now approaching 50, chose ginseng as the avenue by which to write of his life, with its nagging working-class guilt that "what I do isn't real work." But it is: Writing about ginseng itself takes him into the lives of others, from Hmong refugees in California (and from there the Midwest, and now to Oklahoma to grow legal marijuana), to farmers and agronomists in China and Taiwan. He's learned much in his travels, as when a back-to-the-lander tells him that a ginseng monoculture is as harmful as any other single-crop agriculture, defeated by companion planting: "The forest, like the human body, is not simply an assemblage of parts, but an open system in communication with itself." He returns, too, to Wisconsin, with a newfound respect for his parents' hard lives, even as they respect his choices. Thompson's closing is poignant and memorable, enshrining the recognition that all the labor of ginseng is a Sisyphean one, since "the value is in what's left behind in the gouged out earth." A spectacular and inspired graphic memoir that traces the many threads of a remarkable root. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.