Many a gardener will likely find that motivation from this pleasant book.
Reflections on being saved, and finding happiness, through gardening.
Early in the book, Roach (And I Shall Have Some Peace There, 2011, etc.) includes a quote from Bertrand Russell: "Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite." This conundrum encapsulates this third book from Roach, a longtime blogger and former editor for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. From the descriptions within, the author gardens in much the same way she writes—nothing is turned away, provided there's a suitable space for it. Roach considers the sounds of gardening, terminology, different pricings of what she grows to sell, childhood gardens, the passing of seasons—both for a garden and for a person—and the contributions of science toward the creation of a more pleasing experience of garden tending. The author is also unafraid of poking fun at herself and the many well-entrenched habits of gardening she cannot back away from—for example, having spent a lifetime gardening in long pants, she tried shorts only to relent within the half-hour, feeling that she was doing a disservice to the colors of the flowers with "the color of the canvas I provide with my tender flesh." Roach scatters gardening tips throughout the book, noting that other books provide more along those lines but that these tips are shared in the interest of spurring on readers to return to their own gardens.
Many a gardener will likely find that motivation from this pleasant book.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4555-0198-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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