Many a gardener will likely find that motivation from this pleasant book.
Reflections on being saved, and finding happiness, through gardening.
Early in the book, Roach (And I Shall Have Some Peace There, 2011, etc.) includes a quote from Bertrand Russell: "Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite." This conundrum encapsulates this third book from Roach, a longtime blogger and former editor for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. From the descriptions within, the author gardens in much the same way she writes—nothing is turned away, provided there's a suitable space for it. Roach considers the sounds of gardening, terminology, different pricings of what she grows to sell, childhood gardens, the passing of seasons—both for a garden and for a person—and the contributions of science toward the creation of a more pleasing experience of garden tending. The author is also unafraid of poking fun at herself and the many well-entrenched habits of gardening she cannot back away from—for example, having spent a lifetime gardening in long pants, she tried shorts only to relent within the half-hour, feeling that she was doing a disservice to the colors of the flowers with "the color of the canvas I provide with my tender flesh." Roach scatters gardening tips throughout the book, noting that other books provide more along those lines but that these tips are shared in the interest of spurring on readers to return to their own gardens.
Many a gardener will likely find that motivation from this pleasant book.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4555-0198-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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