The author has cut a smart niche for herself in garden writing: unceremonious, except when ceremony is in order.
Browning (Around the House and in the Garden, 2002) may be the editor-in-chief of House & Garden, but her half-acre patch north of New York City is anything but precious.
And she’s too gruff and cultured to think of it as a dark secret. Surrounding her home is a typical suburban garden, Browning writes: “squeezed, stuffed, parched . . . full of the hobbling steps we take—and the big mistakes we make—when learning to do something.” Browning might occasionally dream of reproducing “something I clipped from a story about an English garden: a double row of lavender flanking a long, thick bed of crimson peonies,” but there is the question of space and light and temperament. So be it if pachysandra is her answer: “I find plant snobberies to be misguided and useless.” This is neither denial nor hot air, for Browning is just as happy to talk about the condition of her driveway as her flowerbeds. She’s not shy about confessing the hatred she harbors for the neighbors’ Norway maple either. (“I should have known that asking them to cut down the tree was not the right way to begin the conversation.”) Her gardening approach may be haphazard, but it is also full of possibilities for romance; a stirring, complex connection is the garden’s gift to her and the gentleman in her life. The garden is a vexatious sanctuary full of unforced parables and revealing of Browning’s “defiant slavishness” for Helpful Men, the guys who do the heavy lifting at ground level, leaving her to explore the metaphors. Still, she’s willing to delve into more mundane subjects, such as the value of lightweight lawn furniture, before floating upward to invoke “the chance to breathe in the fragrance of lilies glowing in moonlight and wrap your arms around someone you love.”
The author has cut a smart niche for herself in garden writing: unceremonious, except when ceremony is in order.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-4665-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
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
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