This charming book shows how indebted the world is to Ingram for his work in creating “a shared treasure—the cherry...
The story of the connection that linked one man, one flower, and two countries.
Lovers of the outdoors, especially gardeners, will find much to enjoy in Japanese journalist Abe’s first English-language book, which won the Nihon Essayist Club Award in 2016. The author engagingly chronicles the travels and plant-collecting adventures of Collingwood Ingram (1880-1981). The Englishman, born to wealth in Victorian times, spent his sickly youth wandering the countryside, where he developed a passion for birds. In 1902, he traveled to Japan to see the birds there, which were similar to England’s, and was swept up by the beauty of the country; the young man vowed to return. After World War I, he gradually lost interest in ornithology but began an obsession with horticulture, spurred by his family’s move to Kent in 1919. On the property, he found two magnificent flowering Japanese cherry trees, leading him to a long life of discovering, preserving, breeding, grafting, and sharing rare varieties. Interspersed throughout the book are pieces of Japan’s history over the last 2,000 years, and Abe provides sufficient detail to edify but never to bore. The author clearly shows the national importance of the cherry tree and how its perception changed with Westernization. Abe’s statement that Japan is and was the world’s most artistic nation is exemplified by the 250 varieties of cherry tree developed during that era. In the 1920s, as Japan nationalized and modernized, the importance of reviving failing cherry trees was forgotten; there was no money, urgency, or political will to save them. Thanks to the enterprising work of Ingram, however, “they bloomed around the world, in arboretums and parks, along city streets and riverbanks and in millions of suburban gardens.” Indeed, writes the author, “Ingram had helped to change the face of spring.”
This charming book shows how indebted the world is to Ingram for his work in creating “a shared treasure—the cherry blossom—for all to enjoy.”Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3357-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2019
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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