Lighter-than-air enjoyment: a primer for the more chewy offerings of Henry Mitchell, Eleanor Perenyi, and Miriam Osler.
An amiable journey through Vanderbilt’s (Golden Days, 1998) gardening year.
The garden is a small patch, a half acre in northern New Jersey, and Vanderbilt came to it slowly: “If the grass was reasonably green and reasonably trim, well, that was pretty much the beginning and end of my thoughts about landscaping.” Gradually, his gardening instincts took hold, and he recounts here his education as a gardener and the evolution of his garden, following the march of seasons. Unassumingly, he offers friendly if wooden advice—the viburnum “needs to be pruned down . . . now is a good time to do it so I don’t crush the fern and hosta around it later”—and a whole bouquet of truisms. “Planning, patience, and persistence [are] the three human ingredients necessary to create a garden,” and the four nonhuman: “Time is as essential in gardening as rain, soil, and sun.” Vanderbilt can be wistful to a fault—“When for a moment we suddenly see and listen and feel, life is enchantment,” he says, and “insects shrill through drowsy summer afternoons. Days dream to dusk”—but then he will offer up something so funny and out of character that he’ll win you back: “The lilies, so prim and proper when I left them, look like a prom queen crawling on her hands and knees out from under the stadium bleachers.” Since he seems such a properly organic gent, it’s pleasantly jarring to read, “so unless you have nothing else to do but be a bartender for your slugs, you quickly learn you must turn to chemical warfare.” Vanderbilt’s freight of literary references could have been halved, but a few are gems, like Robert Frost’s “Late in life I have come on fern, / Now lichens are due to have their turn.”
Lighter-than-air enjoyment: a primer for the more chewy offerings of Henry Mitchell, Eleanor Perenyi, and Miriam Osler.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-4180-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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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