A rich trove of gardening lore and history.
Informative and generously illustrated volume detailing a British clan’s multigenerational contribution to horticulture.
Vividly describing changes in both gardening and the family’s fortunes, Shephard (Pickled, Potted, and Canned, 2001) begins her tale with young John Veitch, an apprentice gardener who left Scotland to work in a London nursery in 1768. He soon moved to Devon, where he designed and worked on the gardens at Killerton before establishing his own nursery near Exeter. Though the Veitch family stands at the heart of this account, the author also evokes their times. An expanding interest in landscape design and exotic plants, made possible by Victorian England’s burgeoning wealth, led to lavish expenditure on garden design as well as the purchase of such newly discovered and costly plants as fuchsias, orchids, and monkey puzzle trees. The Veitch family’s nurseries spanned three centuries, and as she describes their distinguished contributions to horticultural history, Shephard also celebrates the great plant hunters who worked for them. Men like the Lobb brothers and Ernest Wilson made discoveries under arduous conditions in China and South America that established the Veitches’ fortune, often at the cost of their own health and even lives. The author chronicles the family’s decision during the 1850s to move their headquarters to London’s Chelsea neighborhood, where they could take advantage of a larger market and provide rare, exotic, and expensive plants to the newly monied building country houses near London. The Veitches introduced the first orchid hybrids and numerous new species (many no longer grown), but they are less vivid than the plants they nurtured and their horticultural milieu, which spanned the sweeping parks of Capability Brown, the herbaceous borders of Gertrude Jekyll, and two world wars. Noting that the family destroyed many of its private papers, Shephard has to rely primarily on secondary sources to tell a story that ended in 1969, when Mildred Veitch sold the Exeter nursery.
A rich trove of gardening lore and history.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-58234-256-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
Essential for fans and the definitive celebration of a show that made history by knowing the rules and breaking every one of...
Everything you ever wanted to know about America’s favorite Mafia serial—and then some.
New York magazine TV critic Seitz (Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion, 2015, etc.) and Rolling Stone TV critic Sepinwall (Breaking Bad 101: The Complete Critical Companion, 2017, etc.) gather a decade’s worth of their smart, lively writing about New Jersey’s most infamous crime family. As they note, The Sopranos was first shot in 1997, helmed by master storyteller David Chase, of Northern Exposure and Rockford Files renown, who unveiled his creation at an odd time in which Robert De Niro had just appeared in a film about a Mafioso in therapy. The pilot was “a hybrid slapstick comedy, domestic sitcom, and crime thriller, with dabs of ’70s American New Wave grit. It is high and low art, vulgar and sophisticated.” It barely hinted at what was to come, a classic of darkness and cynicism starring James Gandolfini, an actor “obscure enough that, coupled with the titanic force of his performance, it was easy to view him as always having been Tony Soprano.” Put Gandolfini together with one of the best ensembles and writing crews ever assembled, and it’s small wonder that the show is still remembered, discussed, and considered a classic. Seitz and Sepinwall occasionally go too Freudian (“Tony is a human turd, shat out by a mother who treats her son like shit”), though sometimes to apposite effect: Readers aren’t likely to look at an egg the same way ever again. The authors’ interviews with Chase are endlessly illuminating, though we still won’t ever know what really happened to the Soprano family on that fateful evening in 2007. “It’s not something you just watch,” they write. “It’s something you grapple with, accept, resist, accept again, resist again, then resolve to live with”—which, they add, is “absolutely in character for this show.”
Essential for fans and the definitive celebration of a show that made history by knowing the rules and breaking every one of them.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3494-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This early reader is an excellent introduction to the March on Washington in 1963 and the important role in the march played by Martin Luther King Jr. Ruffin gives the book a good, dramatic start: “August 28, 1963. It is a hot summer day in Washington, D.C. More than 250,00 people are pouring into the city.” They have come to protest the treatment of African-Americans here in the US. With stirring original artwork mixed with photographs of the events (and the segregationist policies in the South, such as separate drinking fountains and entrances to public buildings), Ruffin writes of how an end to slavery didn’t mark true equality and that these rights had to be fought for—through marches and sit-ins and words, particularly those of Dr. King, and particularly on that fateful day in Washington. Within a year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed: “It does not change everything. But it is a beginning.” Lots of visual cues will help new readers through the fairly simple text, but it is the power of the story that will keep them turning the pages. (Easy reader. 6-8)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-448-42421-5
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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