A quiet country pleasure.
A historian’s account of how he uncovered the identity of a mysterious wild rose growing on the old farming estate of an illustrious Venetian ancestor.
When di Robilant (Irresistible North: From Venice to Greenland on the Trail of the Zen Brothers, 2011, etc.) visited the former home of his great-great-great-great-grandmother Lucia Mocenigo, it was solely to make connection with a part of his past. But then the caretaker showed him a magnificent silvery-pink rose. Its delicately fruity fragrance and noble carriage told the author that “this was an old rose of some importance”; yet no one knew where it had come from. Captivated by the mystery surrounding this flower, di Robilant began an investigation into its possible origins. Another chance encounter—this time with a diary Lucia kept during her stay at the court of Emperor Napoleon—suggested that the rose had come to Venice via his ancestor. At the time she lived in France, Paris was “in the throes of a mad love affair with roses.” Lucia did not become a collector like her friend the former Empress Josephine, but she did develop an interest in botany and brought home a variety of different roses. Di Robilant was fairly certain that the “rosa moceniga” was among them; however, he had no conclusive proof. His journey took him to historical archives in Paris and brought him into contact with rose collectors and specialists, from whom the author learned about individual rose species and the often colorful histories behind them. Yet it would be happy accident—this time in an Umbrian garden full of old Chinese roses—that would lead him to the answers he sought about the “rosa moceniga.” Illustrated throughout with charming watercolors, Di Robilant’s is a unique exploration of how human history often leaves its imprint in the most unexpected of places.
A quiet country pleasure.Pub Date: April 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0307962928
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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