Many a gardener will likely find that motivation from this pleasant book.
Reflections on being saved, and finding happiness, through gardening.
Early in the book, Roach (And I Shall Have Some Peace There, 2011, etc.) includes a quote from Bertrand Russell: "Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite." This conundrum encapsulates this third book from Roach, a longtime blogger and former editor for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. From the descriptions within, the author gardens in much the same way she writes—nothing is turned away, provided there's a suitable space for it. Roach considers the sounds of gardening, terminology, different pricings of what she grows to sell, childhood gardens, the passing of seasons—both for a garden and for a person—and the contributions of science toward the creation of a more pleasing experience of garden tending. The author is also unafraid of poking fun at herself and the many well-entrenched habits of gardening she cannot back away from—for example, having spent a lifetime gardening in long pants, she tried shorts only to relent within the half-hour, feeling that she was doing a disservice to the colors of the flowers with "the color of the canvas I provide with my tender flesh." Roach scatters gardening tips throughout the book, noting that other books provide more along those lines but that these tips are shared in the interest of spurring on readers to return to their own gardens.
Many a gardener will likely find that motivation from this pleasant book.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4555-0198-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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