A splendid, moving collection memorably celebrating two remarkable women's shared affection for the making and tending of...
Letters between the famous New Yorker editor and a distinguished southern garden-writer chronicle their friendship, as well as the joys and travails of gardening.
The correspondence begins in May 1958, when Lawrence writes to congratulate White on her New Yorker essay “A Romp in the Catalogues,” and ends with White’s death in 1977. Lawrence, who lived with her mother in Charlotte, North Carolina, wrote a weekly column for the Charlotte Observer, had published several well-received books, including A Southern Garden, and also designed gardens. White, recently relocated to Maine with husband E.B. White, continued to edit and write for the New Yorker but now had more time to garden and to maintain a correspondence (though illness, travel, and work cause some breaks in the flow here). The two became friends through their letters, meeting only once in 1967. In the correspondence, they commiserate with and encourage each other in writing and gardening projects. White, thanking Lawrence for a copy of her book The Little Bulbs, hopes it will expand her collection of bulbs; she notes in 1959 that she picked roses until the end of November; she details catalogues she receives and tells Lawrence, “I am with you in detesting most garden books and their sentimentality or their jokes.” Lawrence writes that she is “ the most casual gardener. . . . When things get sick I destroy them”; she gives her opinion of Gertrude Jekyll (“best book is Home and Garden”); and describes her long search to find out who or what Ornithogalum balansae was named for—without the capitalization, she wasn’t sure whether balansa “was a place or a person.” Their delight in gardening is increasingly circumscribed by their physical condition: White suffers a series of debilitating illnesses; Lawrence must take care of her bedridden mother and then suffers from painful arthritis.
A splendid, moving collection memorably celebrating two remarkable women's shared affection for the making and tending of gardens.Pub Date: April 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-8070-8558-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A superb book about doing his job by a master of his craft.
The renowned writer offers advice on information-gathering and nonfiction composition.
The book consists of eight instructive and charming essays about creating narratives, all of them originally composed for the New Yorker, where McPhee (Silk Parachute, 2010, etc.) has been a contributor since the mid-1960s. Reading them consecutively in one volume constitutes a master class in writing, as the author clearly demonstrates why he has taught so successfully part-time for decades at Princeton University. In one of the essays, McPhee focuses on the personalities and skills of editors and publishers for whom he has worked, and his descriptions of those men and women are insightful and delightful. The main personality throughout the collection, though, is McPhee himself. He is frequently self-deprecating, occasionally openly proud of his accomplishments, and never boring. In his magazine articles and the books resulting from them, McPhee rarely injects himself except superficially. Within these essays, he offers a departure by revealing quite a bit about his journalism, his teaching life, and daughters, two of whom write professionally. Throughout the collection, there emerge passages of sly, subtle humor, a quality often absent in McPhee’s lengthy magazine pieces. Since some subjects are so weighty—especially those dealing with geology—the writing can seem dry. There is no dry prose here, however. Almost every sentence sparkles, with wordplay evident throughout. Another bonus is the detailed explanation of how McPhee decided to tackle certain topics and then how he chose to structure the resulting pieces. Readers already familiar with the author’s masterpieces—e.g., Levels of the Game, Encounters with the Archdruid, Looking for a Ship, Uncommon Carriers, Oranges, and Coming into the Country—will feel especially fulfilled by McPhee’s discussions of the specifics from his many books.
A superb book about doing his job by a master of his craft.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-14274-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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