New Age hokum meets true perception in this work of horticultural confession and counsel. ``Inner gardening is about thinking for yourself, being yourself, and then watching the results flower around you.'' Handelsman, onetime gardening columnist for New Age Journal and Vogue, finds in plant life a dependable source of human spiritual renewal. For her, gardening is an introspective pleasure that doubles as a metaphor for our own survival. In this collection of linked essays about her coming of age as a gardener and as a woman, the metaphor can be strikingly persuasive when the writer decides to tell revelatory personal stories. For instance, her account of watching a 100-year-old cottonwood tree, ``like a living green Sphinx,'' be felled near her home in Bishop, Calif., conveys the horror of gratuitous slaughter and helpless mortality with a disarming power. But when Handelsman writes in more general terms about gardening's virtues, she sometimes makes herself ridiculous. This devout member of the Prince Charles school of plant relations- -i.e., talk to 'em—advises us: ``Ask the plant to help you'' and ``Thank your plants whenever you can.'' She believes that ``plants provide unconditional love,'' and she needs them to. So when beneficially predatory praying mantises turned up to patrol her cosmos flowers, she ``blew them kisses and billed and cooed.'' Sentimentality set loose in a yard can seem deranged, no matter how good the cause. Some unusual insights are mixed in here with utter daftness.
Pub Date: June 17, 1996
ISBN: 0-525-94057-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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