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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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