A gentle elegy on the “charisma” of gardens.
A memoir about how gardening sharpens the eye and buoys the spirit.
In a graceful melding of memoir and reflections on literature and art, award-winning fiction and children’s book author Lively (The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories, 2017, etc.), a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, celebrates the delights of planning, planting, weeding, and harvesting a garden. For her, gardening is “both formative and essential,” honing “an extra way of looking about me, and an abiding and enriching engagement” with the world. The gardener, she writes, “is always noticing, appreciating, recording.” Besides recounting family gardens in Cairo and Somerset, her own gardens in Oxford and London, and her exuberant trips to garden centers, Lively considers the meaning of gardens to writers such as Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton (she admires Wharton’s “delectable” and “lavish” French gardens), Willa Cather, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, who indelibly evoked the “practical, essential” importance of the pioneer garden. To Lively, Beatrix Potter’s Mr. McGregor is “the archetypal gardener in literary fiction.” Artists—Monet, Van Gogh, Klee, Klimt, Matisse, and Edvard Munch, among many others—were drawn to gardens as “a resource for the exploration of colour possibilities, of the evanescence of light and movement, the study of form and structure” as well as for “the expression of mood and emotion.” Lively returns often to the theme of time, which gardening makes strikingly visible. “We are always gardening for a future,” she observes; “we are supposing, assuming, a future.” At the age of 84, she is aware that some of her current plantings “will outlast me,” but they produce joy nevertheless. Gardening, she adds, “corrals time, pinning it to the seasons, to the gardening year, by summoning up the garden in the past, the garden to come.” The gardener “floats free of the present, and looks forward, acquires expectations, carries next spring in the mind’s eye.”
A gentle elegy on the “charisma” of gardens.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-55837-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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