A rich feast of a book that celebrates the extraordinarily satisfying joys of making and keeping a garden.
A novice beguilingly describes making her first garden, understanding that this project involves as much learning about life as about digging a flowerbed.
Stewart, raised and educated in Texas, moves with husband Scott to Santa Cruz, California, where they rent a bungalow opposite the local fairground and across from the boardwalk. Being within walking distance of the ocean and the beach more than compensates for the noise and lack of privacy in the summer, though on one occasion Stewart finds tourists sunbathing on her patio. The garden has been neglected and, with the exceptions of a lemon tree, an orange tree, and a wisteria, is mostly bare dirt. Stewart knows what she doesn’t want: something that looks like the lawn-covered suburban tracts she grew up with in Texas. Appending a collection of helpful tips to each chapter, she recalls beginning the garden on her first Saturday in the house, when she starts clearing the weeds and finds herself contending with the ubiquitous and obdurate oxalis. Soon she is a regular customer at the local nursery, where she splurges on plants and learns about the value of adding compost and raising red worms. When a houseguest is expected, she suddenly discovers the benefits of planting already blooming (but hitherto despised) annuals. Stewart writes about her two cats’ delight in sampling newly planted catmint; her vegetable garden, which eventually has to be corralled into more formal beds; the gratifying sensations of eating homegrown lettuce and tomatoes. She closes in October, as she puts the garden to bed for winter and observes migrating Monarch butterflies enjoying the last of her summer flowers. While gardening, she learns about her neighbors, about the town itself, and about the seasons that order a garden and a gardener’s life.
A rich feast of a book that celebrates the extraordinarily satisfying joys of making and keeping a garden.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2001
ISBN: 1-56512-240-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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