A courtly, gallant backward glance at one woman's life in gardening. English-born, California-based Welsh here takes stock of gardening as a genteel tribal inheritance: Her Yorkshire family had cultivated it as an honored tradition. But there is little that is proper or stodgy in the pursuit. Rather, this writer gallivants and consorts, with plants as with words, and her green companions are engagingly droll. In a chapter on wisteria that mixes practical advice liberally with personal reminiscence, for example, Welsh confides how, after she scolded her white-flowering wisteria for not being purple, the vine promptly died. It later revived, obligingly producing purple blossoms, after she apologized for the previous insult. Illustrations abound in the book: candid snaps, like the one of Welsh as a chubby ``girleen'' bedecked ``in nothing but flowers''; landscape photography, exposing the architectural tendencies of massed delphiniums in a British plot; and decorative portraits of poppies and others twining their way up the page. An especially comic visual vignette: pictures of Welsh, her mother, babysitter, and brother caring for chickens and getting the hang of a tractor. The author offers detailed and sensible counsel on pest control, the construction of garden paths, the mainstays of Japanese gardens, methods of composting, and more. Yet Welsh's claim to charm springs mainly from a store of high spirits and from her descriptive liveliness. Surveying the rough patches in a past that includes her mother's several marriages, geographic dislocations, and sundry money worries, she seems to hop gaily to the nearest flower—and thrive. Elysian messages murmured by one with a nobly stiff upper lip.
Pub Date: April 16, 1996
ISBN: 0-8118-0904-8
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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