An ornamental study, frustratingly lacking in contextual cultivation.
British journalist Wulf (co-author: This Other Eden: Seven Great Gardens and 300 Years of English History, 2005) explores into the personalities that spurred the evolution of the 18th-century English garden.
Renaissance and baroque gardens on the European continent were characterized by smooth lawns, clipped hedges and topiary in a formal, geometrical structure, writes the author. When Thomas Fairchild, already famed for his luxuriant nursery outside of London, developed the first hybrid in 1716, he “set in motion a chain of events so momentous that in time no gardener would ever think about plants in the same way again.” Wulf loosely follows these developments in smart, stylish prose without delving very deeply. “Fairchild’s mule,” a cross between sweet William and a carnation, proved that plants reproduced sexually, an incendiary notion that Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus underscored in his binomial nomenclature. This encouraged gardeners to meddle empirically in their own garden plots, just as Philip Miller’s enormously accessible Gardeners Dictionary (1731), a catalogue of all plants then in cultivation in Britain, transformed gardening from an aristocratic preserve into the passionate pursuit of amateurs. Profoundly influenced by Miller’s dictionary, London cloth merchant Peter Collinson began importing seeds and plantings from the North American colonies, specifically from Pennsylvania, with the help of Philadelphia farmer John Bartram. These floral dispatches, much desired because their hardiness precluded the need for hothouses, continued for more than four decades and helped make the English garden a natural-growing perennial marvel. Another contributor to this sea change was the treasure of botanical specimens brought back from Captain Cook’s South Seas expedition, organized and bankrolled by celebrated botanist Joseph Banks, who was elected president of the Royal Society in 1778. Banks’ economic use of such plants as cotton and the Indian gum tree propelled British industry, but Wulf skirts this crucial subject. She also gives scant attention to the idea of the English garden as an Enlightenment ideal.
An ornamental study, frustratingly lacking in contextual cultivation.Pub Date: April 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-27023-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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