Sensitive and luminously written.
A perceptive biography of one of the country’s great gardeners and gardening writers.
Wilson, who previously edited her subject’s correspondence with Katharine S. White (Two Gardeners, 2002), atmospherically evokes the life, milieu, and work of Elizabeth Lawrence (1904–85), who cared as much about the meaning as the making of gardens. Though she traveled and had a wide circle of friends, Lawrence never really left home, Wilson notes; her house, garden, family, and church were the cornerstones of her existence. Except for her years at Barnard College in New York, she lived in North Carolina with her widowed mother, first in the family home in Raleigh, and then in Charlotte. In Raleigh she and her mother together created a showcase garden, but the Charlotte grounds and house were both designed by Lawrence, who used her garden as a laboratory as well as a refuge. The eldest daughter of a well-born southern family, she had, since childhood, been interested in plants, which she collected and studied. Originally intending to be a poet, she abandoned the idea after numerous rejections, but her nonfiction, including a weekly gardening column in the Charlotte Observer, was infused with a distinctive literary sensibility that won her a wide circle of general readers. An intensely private person who valued solitude (though she advised that no one can garden alone), Lawrence was reticent about her own emotions. Wilson does track down a failed love affair in New York, but Lawrence never married, remained close to her family, and enjoyed a wide circle of interesting friends that numbered White and Eudora Welty among them. Her books, especially A Southern Garden, The Little Bulbs, and Gardens in Winter, are now regarded as classic examples of the best garden-writing, combining as they do practical information with personal observation, and evincing an abiding sense of gardening as a metaphor for life.
Sensitive and luminously written.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8070-8560-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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
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