Los Angelesbased architecture critic and novelist Whiteson (White Snake, 1982) elegantly turns the transformation of his backyard into metaphor and memoir, seamlessly enhanced by his newly acquired gardening lore. Spending time at home to write a novel, which fictionally recreates his meeting with second wife, Aviva, on a Greek Island in the 1970s, Whiteson at first neglects the unkempt garden of the house the couple had bought in the western section of Hollywood in 1987. Ever since working as a young architect in London ``with Englishmen who went on and on about their tea roses and their `mum,' '' he'd ``dismissed garden chatter as supremely silly.'' There was also a darker reason for his dislike: Growing up in Zimbabwe with his Jewish immigrant parents, he had been repelled by his father's obsession with his garden. Unable to love his father as he should, Whiteson had thought his father's garden ``too contrived, too prissy, too fearful of wildness.'' Worse, he felt that it ``unwittingly laid bare his [father's] heartfelt weltschmertz, his sentimental pessimism and tragic sense of life's attrition.'' A Proustian moment at the local hardware store, however, when a strangely familiar scent evokes pleasant memories from the past, prompts Whiteson to buy all the plants that combine to create the fragrance. And of course, he is soon hooked. He now sees his neglected backyard as a ``green novel'' where plants collectively form a ``horticultural narrative.'' But as his ``green novel'' prospers, his ``white garden''—the novel—is dying, and as he records his proper garden response to the novel's failure (by rather drastic means), he weaves in recollections of his African childhood, his two marriages, life in Europe, and insights into what it means to live now in ``crazy-sensible L.A.,'' where ``the only way to cope...is to be rooted in your own defined, defended ground.'' One of those rare books about gardening that encourage rather than intimidate.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-571-19868-6
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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