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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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