An instructive, inspirational, and indispensable guide for anyone who tires of lawn care and wants an alternative that could...
Bogh and Schnetz outline the steps to transform a water-hungry lawn into an inviting, drought-resistant, less-hassle garden.
In light of California’s recent law mandating water conservation as well as the increasing danger that more U.S. and global regions may experience crippling droughts, Bogh and Schnetz’s ecologically responsible book is timely and wise. Though the book advocates a no-lawn approach and highlights plants and soils of the arid West, the authors explain that much of the information regarding water-efficient garden design and planting can be applied to all climate zones. The book takes the novice gardener on a soup-to-nuts journey from methods on how to kill a water-hogging lawn to design choices for creating a lovely outdoor room decorated with stones, tile, and drought-resistant trees and plants. The authors cite some shocking statistics: for U.S. homeowners living in arid regions, 60 to 75 percent of their household water is used for watering lawns, and 25 million acres of lawn is tended to by U.S. residents at an annual cost of $6.4 billion. Their well-organized guide begins with some basic FAQs about designing, developing, and maintaining a no-grass yard. From there, the book offers a comprehensive description, in helpful detail and with color photos, of steps necessary to complete the project. Other topics include envisioning a “paradise garden,” finding landscaping professionals, hiring contractors, acquiring necessary permits, soil and composting, irrigation techniques, choosing trees and plants, and pruning strategies. Wonderful resources, including a large list of gardening websites, close out the index. The book’s visual layout is also appealing, with plenty of color photos providing fine support as well as inspiration for design ideas. Brief, practical tips dot the text, as do lyrical observations about nature and gardens from writers such as Stanley Kunitz and Wendell Berry. The authors strike a perfect tone between deliberate planning and following your heart, experimenting with textures and colors and developing a green thumb through some trial and error.
An instructive, inspirational, and indispensable guide for anyone who tires of lawn care and wants an alternative that could help mother earth.Pub Date: July 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4929-5510-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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