Accessible, one-stop manual for fledgling green-thumbs.
Basic guide for first-time urban gardeners.
The local food movement is urging more people out of the grocery aisles and into their backyards, and Taylor’s just the person to shepherd them through the transition. The author, a longtime member and education director of the renowned urban-gardening organization Seattle Tilth, offers simple step-by-step instruction for planning, growing and caring for a garden. From small-container gardens to community plots to apiaries, Taylor distills her years of expertise into an accessible how-to format, complete with useful illustrations and charts. She includes readily replicable tests to determine soil type, and troubleshoots water issues and nutrient loads in the process. There are guidelines for composting, rain harvesting and tool buying. The author explains how to deal with good and bad insects, as well as other garden predators, providing eco-friendly solutions for a number of common garden conundrums. The book includes a list of easy-to-grow fruits and vegetables, supplemented with cultivation and harvesting tips that aren’t readily available on the back of a seed packet. Expert techniques can be found here as well, alongside tips for novices, and her straightforward writing style is suitable for all levels of gardener. Not a complete resource on its own, Taylor’s guide suggests a number of websites, organizations and other gardening books that will take beginners well into the next growing season.
Accessible, one-stop manual for fledgling green-thumbs.Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-57912-862-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
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
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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