The founders of Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company present an overview of the heirloom seed movement.
When other kids his age were outdoors playing tag, Jere Gettle spent his childhood combing through seed catalogues. It was then that he first noticed a disturbing trend: Each year an increasing number of seeds were disappearing. To counteract this, he started saving his own seeds. Fast forward two decades later and Gettle, along with wife Emilee, are now the proprietors of one of the country’s most successful heirloom seed companies. Jere, who the New York Times once referred to as “the Indiana Jones of seeds,” has traveled the world in search of the seeds he now makes readily available to consumers. In their debut book, the Gettles show novices how to get away from the standard fare found in their neighbors’ plots and grow truly amazing varieties. Their primer opens with an introduction to heirloom variety seeds and a basic gardening guide before moving on to highlight a variety of backyard favorites. Beginning alphabetically with amaranth and ending with watermelon, the Gettles cover the cultivation, cooking and seed-saving for an extraordinary number of plant varieties.
Readers will find the ancestral versions of the most common produce so markedly different from their grocery-store counterparts that they might think they’ve been farmed on a different planet altogether.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2439-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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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
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Noted jazz and pop record producer Thiele offers a chatty autobiography. Aided by record-business colleague Golden, Thiele traces his career from his start as a ``pubescent, novice jazz record producer'' in the 1940s through the '50s, when he headed Coral, Dot, and Roulette Records, and the '60s, when he worked for ABC and ran the famous Impulse! jazz label. At Coral, Thiele championed the work of ``hillbilly'' singer Buddy Holly, although the only sessions he produced with Holly were marred by saccharine strings. The producer specialized in more mainstream popsters like the irrepressibly perky Teresa Brewer (who later became his fourth wife) and the bubble-machine muzak-meister Lawrence Welk. At Dot, Thiele was instrumental in recording Jack Kerouac's famous beat- generation ramblings to jazz accompaniment (recordings that Dot's president found ``pornographic''), while also overseeing a steady stream of pop hits. He then moved to the Mafia-controlled Roulette label, where he observed the ``silk-suited, pinky-ringed'' entourage who frequented the label's offices. Incredibly, however, Thiele remembers the famously hard-nosed Morris Levy, who ran the label and was eventually convicted of extortion, as ``one of the kindest, most warm-hearted, and classiest music men I have ever known.'' At ABC/Impulse!, Thiele oversaw the classic recordings of John Coltrane, although he is the first to admit that Coltrane essentially produced his own sessions. Like many producers of the day, Thiele participated in the ownership of publishing rights to some of the songs he recorded; he makes no apology for this practice, which he calls ``entirely appropriate and without any ethical conflicts.'' A pleasant, if not exactly riveting, memoir that will be of most interest to those with a thirst for cocktail-hour stories of the record biz. (25 halftones, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-508629-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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