A pleasantly campy, my-life-in-Elysium gardener's memoir. Blajan, born in Monte Carlo, but now of uncertain age, moved six years ago to ``a small cottage in an extremely rural area near the Belgian border.'' Our narrator is nothing if not coy. He never does tell us, for example, which nation he lives in with so many ladybugs, weeds, wasps, flowers, and slugs. Blajan builds an enchanting personal myth from his universal backyard in Eden. Like an Adam who can't stop snickering, he discovers nature with a light-handed, unconventional Çlan: Before his very eyes, a fanciful stinkhorn fungus, ``vaguely obscene,'' swells up pink and orange from the depths of a hedge. He learns that ``pine cones do have voices''—which are exercised when heat causes the cones to expand and explode. As a self-described ``horticultural nitwit'' who spends half of every year as an officer on a cruise ship, Blajan comes home to diddle with the bliss of daffodils: ``Some looked like roses and some looked like weird spidery insects. Some looked like they ought to be psychoanalyzed.'' Yet these brief, sociable, lyric essays do not just joke around. By the time Blajan has told the tale of a centuries-old linden tree, culminating in the tree's bizarre funeral service, it is difficult not to be moved. Likewise, his verbal snapshot of an elderly, blind gardener and her acute sense of smell, sound, and touch is unforgettable. ``Silence does not exist. Silence is a patchwork of little sounds,'' he decides because of her. Though Blajan's giddiness can get the better of him, he knows how to charm: ``We should festoon the entire world with garlands that will reach from one continent to another and bring the people together. An impractical and whimsical suggestion, maybe, of which I'm nevertheless very much in favor.'' Peter Pan succumbs gleefully to a toadstool.
Pub Date: April 16, 1997
ISBN: 0-395-85729-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
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
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