A no-nonsense study of a “hobby” that has galvanized and transformed England’s economy—and the country itself.
A knighted English scholar presents a multicentury history of the economics of creating England’s famed gardens, a hugely expensive enterprise both private and public.
In a straightforward, sometimes dry narrative divided into thematic chapters such as “Gardens of the State,” “Designers,” “The Nursery Trade,” and “The Working Gardener,” Floud, who studied economic history at Oxford, always keeps an eye on the financial elements involved in the creation and maintenance of England’s gardens. Even when he discusses the great gardeners—e.g., Lancelot “Capability” Brown (circa 1715-1783)—the author focuses on their business methods, earnings, and costs, an approach that may deter readers seeking simpler pleasures. However, by tracking sums and economy of scale, Floud provides a useful outline of the evolving British economy as a whole. He examines the growth of the “creative industries” alongside manufacturing as well as the rise of a middle class able to afford such luxuries as well-tended gardens, once only the domain of the aristocracy. The author also tracks the technology and sheer physical labor involved in these ambitious projects: draining vast tracts of land, moving tons of dirt, building canals and cascades, and constructing greenhouses (especially popular during the Victorian era). The prevailing fashions have seesawed back and forth from a desire to import seeds and plants to a commitment to isolating native species, which are few. Floud points out that there are only 48 species of “endemic English plants.” Most plants in decorative English gardens have been imported, blown by wind across the Channel, or poached from the New World. Unfortunately, the greatest gardens are usually the product of economic inequality—e.g., Wrest Park in Bedfordshire, which “is the beautiful product of an extremely unequal society.” Finally, Floud looks at the rise of suburban gardens and the “kitchen gardens,” originally designed to supply aristocrats with food year-round.
A no-nonsense study of a “hobby” that has galvanized and transformed England’s economy—and the country itself.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-101-87103-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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