Phillips (Tracking the Vanishing Frogs, 1994) provides a lucid explanation of natural landscaping as she follows in the footsteps of one of its practitioners. The use of native plants—grasses, shrubs, trees, and flowers that predate European settlement of the Americas, species that would be found in vestigial wildlands—is gaining a firm toehold in the field of landscape architecture. It is a trend that bucks our culture's dominant gardening aesthetic: the bigger and brighter and newer and stranger, the better, and there will never ever be enough lawn. Natural landscaping builds on a distinctive regional identity, taking its cues from micro- and macro-climates, soil types and site grades and what grew there in the distant past, fashioning a place-defining wild landscape of native plants and natural terrain, complex and subtle and ecologically sensitive to habitat and biological community. Phillips narrates as Joni Janecki, a landscape architect working in California, tackles three projects: a residential job in posh Montecito, where she is given a much-coveted free rein in planning (though the project remains unstarted); a corporate job at Hewlett-Packard's main headquarters, where her plans get considerable manhandling; and a design for restoring an abused parkland in Salinas. Along the way, Phillips elaborates on the travails of landscape architects (and the four devils of money, time, taste, and client awareness), the history of the nursery industry, the place of sustainability in landscaping, and the debate surrounding ``nativism'' (particularly as it relates to Michael Pollan's controversial article ``Against Nativism''). And Phillips tracks the projects closely, detailing each move, going so far as to tell readers the fate of an asphalt parking lot on one job site, for she is broadly curious about every aspect of the landscaping process. No bones about it, Phillips is a partisan, but she makes an elegant and persuasive case for going native.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-86547-519-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
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
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