“Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden” by Diane Ackerman 508 AC (also in LARGE PRINT)
I had read Ackerman’s “A Natural History of the Senses” (612.8 AC) many years ago and really loved it. “Cultivating Delight”, a compilation of seasonal essays, has the same sensual nature. I was disappointed that no photographs of Ackerman’s garden were included. She may have thought she described it well enough that the reader could see it in the mind’s eye just as well. Besides, she was really describing in lyrical terms what could be gleaned from anyone’s garden–it didn’t have to be hers. In fact, she is quite philosophical in general, starting with her first sentence: “I plan my garden as I wish I could plan my life, with islands of surprise, color, and scent.”
She lovingly describes garden animals like hummingbirds, deer, and frogs: “…we like frogs because they remind us of ourselves, which is why so many cultures have myths in which frogs become people.” And of course, she describes in detail many garden plants in all four seasons including winter with pod carcasses and mummified remains. She writes “I love growth, but I also love form, and few things rise to the architectural beauty of a plant responding to the pep and peril of the seasons.”
She does reference naturalists and gardeners like John Muir, Karl Koopman (bats), Wilson Bentley (snowflakes), and Gertrude Jekyll. And writes about unusual gardens around the world like the Garden Shrine of fertility in Bangkok, the San Lorenzo de Trassanto topiary maze in Spain, and the Garden of Divorce in San Francisco. One of her favorite flowers is the rose and she does recommend some for the novice rose grower: Abraham Darby, Pink Fairy, Reine de Violette–and for a climber–Blaze.
And then there were the ideas she throws out that tickled me, like “a fun thing to do with kids at the end of the summer is to let them run in their socks through a meadow, and then plant the spore-and-seed-clotted socks in an unlikely spot, where the following spring a wildflower meadow will sprout.” Yes, that does sound like fun! And it illustrates one of those “islands of surprise, color, and scent” she loves so well.
Extraordinary is right! I always had a soft spot in my heart for Teddy Roosevelt because he championed the National Park System which I feel is one of the things that makes America great. This biography features his early years and the parents, siblings, aunts, and uncles who influenced him. His relatives were quite amazing. His mother was from the South and his father from the North–but they remained civil during the Civil War. His father helped found institutions in New York City like the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Though I always thought of TR as robust, it turns out he suffered from asthma all his life, but especially as a child. The asthma incidences were excruciating. After his family, the greatest influence on TR was the American West–its landscape and inhabitants both. In a letter to his aunt Bamie he wrote “The country is growing on me, more and more. It has a curious, fantastic beauty of its own….” The Bad Lands looked, he decided, the way Poe sounds. This National Book Award winner for biography is based heavily on family letters and the Roosevelts wrote lots of them. The time period covered is from just before TR was born to when he became at age 42 the youngest President of the United States after the assassination of William McKinley in 1901.
This is a short atmospheric novel, but a lengthy philosophical conversation between two friends who had not seen each other for 41 years. Something mysterious happened during a hunt in 1899 that changed their lives. They had immediately gone their separate ways but were haunted by this incident. Now was their chance to sort things out, get revenge, whatever was needed or wanted. “Embers” was first published in Hungary in 1942 and not translated into English until 2001. There was a lot of controversy over the translation because it was a translation of a German translation of the original Hungarian. Subsequent Marai books published by Knopf in English were translated from the Hungarian. However, Carol Brown Janeway’s translation is impressive. Readers of all three language versions have said so.
This is the first in a series, followed by “To Fetch a Thief”, “Thereby Hangs a Tail”, and “The Dog Who Knew Too Much”. Like a lot of mystery authors who excel at humor, Quinn likes to use puns for titles. This is a light, fun read with page after page of narration from the viewpoint of Chet, a dog who thinks of himself as the partner of human Bernie Little of the Little Detective Agency. The reader chuckles because Chet sounds outlandish and true-to-life at the same time. Any animal lover will especially enjoy this series. Stephen King even gave it a cover blurb: “[Chet's] a great character because he sums up what we all love in dogs: how they love life, and how they love us.”
Wow, I had suggested this novel for the German American Heritage Center Book Group because it had gotten rave reviews and was on a number of “Best of the Year” lists in 2009. When the time came to actually read it though, I (and everyone else) was dismayed because it was a whopping 540 pages long. However, it turned out to be so engrossing and so moving that I (and everyone else) said we were amazed that we were able to read it in a week with no problem whatsoever. The book cover description reads: “Based on a true story, this sweeping saga tells the tale of a working class couple in Berlin who decide to take a stand against the Nazis. More than an edge-of-your-seat thriller, more than a moving romance, even more than literature of the highest order, it’s a deeply moving story of two people who stand up for what’s right, and for each other. // Hans Fallada wrote “Every Man Dies Alone” in a feverish twenty-four days, soon after the end of World War II and his release from a Nazi insane asylum. He did not live to see its publication.”
Paul Gilding has served as head of Greenpeace International, built and led two companies, and advised both Fortune 500 corporations and community-based NGOs. He currently lives in Tasmania. Gilding has no qualms about the end of our growth- and consumer-based economy as we know it, and he is optimistic for the future. He says humans will survive the calamity and be better for it in the end. Getting there will not be pretty, however. There will be lots of destruction (nature-caused and human-made) coupled with plenty of suffering. He’s more confident and positive about the final outcome than I’ve been lately, I’ll say that. And he’s been around the environmental/sustainable/corporate block a lot more times than I have, so maybe he knows what he’s talking about. Although…he keeps saying the earth is finite and so this big change HAS to happen and I kept thinking but what about the universe? I have suspected we’ll despoil the earth entirely and abandon it to move to some other planet. (That’s how cynical I am.)
This is the first in the Sister Fidelma series and is a mystery of Ancient Ireland. Sister Fidelma is an advocate of the courts and she rules on issues of law. There is a foreword in this book that assures the reader that women did have such power and prestige in the 7th century. It was a time when the Catholic Church in England and Ireland was deciding whether to adhere to the gentler, earthier teachings of the Apostle John or go with the harsher, more disciplined teaching of the Apostle Peter and particularly Paul. This caused quite a bit of turmoil and threats of civil war. The story opens with this quotations from Ammianus Marcellinus (c. AD 330-95): “No wild beasts are so cruel as the Christians in their dealing with each other.” I was interested to learn about the International Sister Fidelma Society which has a very thorough, well-constructed website at www.sisterfidelma.com. If you liked “How the Irish Saved Civilization” by Thomas Cahill (LARGE PRINT 941.501 CA), you’d probably enjoy reading this series of more than 20 titles.