Honest and moving, one woman’s initiation into intensive gardening with her mother, which changed a neglected space into...
How a novice gardener became a permaculturalist and found community in the process.
When Edible Seattle editor Weaver (The Butcher and the Vegetarian: One Woman's Romp Through a World of Men, Meat, and Moral Crisis, 2010, etc.) and her mother first found an overgrown half-acre of garden in a quiet neighborhood, they didn’t see the work required to turn the chaos into a cultivated garden. They only saw the potential, feeling a sense of magic as they stood among the huge rhododendrons and blackberry vines laden with berries. Some of Weaver’s best memories from her childhood involved a garden, her mother, and fresh tomatoes and ripe strawberries, and she hoped those brief moments of happiness and togetherness might reappear in this new garden and orchard. Strong descriptions of the numerous vegetable plants and fruit trees Weaver planted and the work involved to reclaim this neglected oasis intermingle with her personal reflections on her childhood, her longings for a solid family life and the desire for a community of friends. Lyrical passages recount the joyous moments Weaver shared with her nieces and nephews, brief passages of time that took her breath away at the beauty of it all—when the light hit at just the right angle or when her nieces shouted with glee, their faces and hands smeared with berry juice. Her anxiety, frustration and weariness also play an integral part in this narrative, as she continued to learn that gardening is not an exact science. Nature has its own moods and quirks as much as any human, and she had to learn to be flexible and adapt or break in the process. The result was an abundance of harvests—of food, friendship and love.
Honest and moving, one woman’s initiation into intensive gardening with her mother, which changed a neglected space into something beautiful and bountiful and shifted their relationship as well.Pub Date: March 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-54807-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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