An occasionally snarky, consistently engaging experiment in environmental science.
A magazine journalist cultivates a farm in his Brooklyn backyard.
Whether chasing a celebrity chef to Brazil or ghostwriting an editor’s intimate chronicle of infidelities, Howard, a former editor at Gourmet magazine, among others, has had more than his share of “hairbrained assignments.” So it came as no surprise when a New York Magazine editor commissioned an experiment in slow-food urban agriculture whereby the author would farm his own provisions—enough to sustain him for one month. Here, the author expands his James Beard Foundation Award–winning article into a book about self-sustainability and the benefits of responsible, eco-friendly consumption. Converting the clay-like “barren earth” of the author’s backyard into a crop-producing garden was no easy feat. Aided by hydroponic technology, plants flourished and the garage soon became a habitable barn. However, tribulations began to mount. Acquiring tilapia proved futile, rabbits resisted mating (“My rabbits don’t fuck like rabbits”), Howard’s pinkie was practically severed from a botched attempt at chicken-coop construction and a surprise tornado drowned bean, squash, pumpkin and tomato plants. The author’s tireless farming efforts also put a strain on his marriage to successful businesswoman Lisa. Woven throughout the refreshingly honest narrative are charming familial memories: the couple’s droll, much-negotiated decision to keep their first child and to marry, the delivery of a second child precipitating a relocation to Prospect Park and frequent asides on Brooklyn’s history and ponderings from farmer and “agrarian activist” and “partisan in the politics of domesticity” Wendell Berry. Howard’s skeptical thoughts on those who seek out locally grown produce versus the “clinical mechanization” of food may flummox environmentally friendly readers, but by harvest time, the author proves an outspoken and productive modern-day farmer.
An occasionally snarky, consistently engaging experiment in environmental science.Pub Date: April 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8516-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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