Riddle pays gardeners a high compliment: He makes you eager to get out in the garden, fill your hands with dirt, and grab...
Plantsman Riddle unfolds the leisurely story of his garden’s evolution—both in his mind and on the ground—in a honeyed, but never cloying, voice.
Elements of memoir creep into his tale as persistently as the local volunteers who creep into his garden to soften and warm what otherwise is a history of the small garden at Riddle’s Catskill home. He provides enough background material to give readers a fair image of himself, but it is his garden that gets the lion’s share of attention. Riddle has a horticultural background—he studied it in college and spent a year in England at Hillier’s; he writes a magazine garden column for Elle Décor; and he admits to a phase of garden snobbery: “Had you been so bold as to suggest that my future garden would include beanpoles, a birdbath, and a rubber tire planter, I would have lost my sense of humor, called you feebleminded, and pitched a fit.” Of course, he loosens his corset, and they all make it into his modest garden, not as campy gestures but as endearments, and end up working for him and the space. Riddle discusses his influences, from Rosemary Verey to Russell Page; his experimentation with annuals; his use of understatement to create intimacy and charm; and the garden features—beckoning rather than overwhelming—that form a group portrait of his family and the friends who have died from AIDS. Earthbound details slow the going at times, but the sheer amount of thinking and doing will forewarn prospective gardeners of the commitment they must make to realize even a fraction of their desires.
Riddle pays gardeners a high compliment: He makes you eager to get out in the garden, fill your hands with dirt, and grab the weeder with relish.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-018805-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
