Instagram Facebook X-twitter Linkedin
Previous
Next

All Nonfiction Coverage

Filter by genre
LifestylesCrafts, Hobbies & Home

Impatient patience

Review by bookpagedev

Books that soothe the itch to get back in the dirt Anybody who loves to garden is having a hard time right now. Here in the mid-South, March gives up a few days so mild that I can’t help but get outside and dig something. The last frost doesn’t come until mid-April, but that never stops me from putting some little thing out that would have preferred to stay inside. I am very, very impatient. This year a number of books are helping me take a breath, step back, and find patience in waiting for the seasons to change. I have enjoyed the work of Ken Druse for many years. His first book, The Nat-ural Garden, was a revelation, filled with pictures of places that hardly looked like “gardens” at all. Artful jungles is more like it. Druse is not trimming topiary; he is creating subtle, elegant gardens that feel like they were planted by Mother Nature herself. He is all about staying close to the place you are gardening: use native plants, be sensitive to the microclimate of your property, remember nature. Each book he writes is an occasion for joy, and his new book, The Passion for Gardening: Inspiration for a Lifetime is his most joyful yet.

Druse has covered a lot of technical ground in his previous books, the “what” of gardening. Here he focuses on the ineffable “why”: what is it that draws people to the garden? He introduces us to gardeners who share his passion for gardening as a lifelong pursuit. A varied group of gardens (one with a topiary, even!) is at the heart of this book, each photographed in a beautiful, careful way. At the core of these gardens is a lot of knowledge and talent and vision. But most of all, there is a passion an infectious kind of love that will inspire all of us who love to make gardens.

Dutch treat Cousins to Ken Druse might be Piet Oudolf and Henk Gerritsen, a renowned pair of gardeners from the Netherlands who are getting a lot of attention for their idea of the natural garden. For the past 20 years, they have scoured Europe and the United States for plants that are sturdy and low maintenance, but have the beautiful appearance of familiar cultivated perennials and annuals. Their gardens have the same looseness and unmanicured appearance that Ken Druse’s have. Planting the Natural Garden (Timber, $34.95, 144 pages, ISBN 088192606X) is their magnum opus of plants a Hall of Fame listing of their time-tested favorites. Included are cultivation details and photographs of each plant, along with suggested combinations and planting diagrams. Anyone who longs to move beyond the basics will marvel at this book for its fresh notion of a natural garden that holds up without looking weedy.

The basics? Begin here I am a Taylor’s junkie. When I first got serious about gardening 10 years ago, Taylor’s Master Guide to Gardening was my bible. If Taylor’s liked a plant, so did I. If it wasn’t in Taylor’s, it wasn’t in my garden.

The latest Taylor’s Guide a whopper as big as the Master Guide continues the same concise, clear format that has helped me so much. Taylor’s Encyclopedia of Garden Plants (Houghton Mifflin, $45, 447 pages, ISBN 0618226443) is filled with more than 1,200 plants: perennials, annuals, grasses, trees, shrubs. It’s not every plant ever propagated; it’s every plant that the Taylor’s Guide experts feel is a good choice for North American gardens. A plant encyclopedia can be many things: a reference, a wish book, a troubleshooter. Taylor’s Encyclopedia of Garden Plants is all these, produced in the most straightforward, lovely way possible.

One small note: Taylor’s gives the pronunciation of each plant, which is a merciful thing when you are trying to sound all smart and name that little blue flower but can’t figure out how to say “platycodon.” (It’s “plat-ee-KOE-don.”) Getting the yard you want The only television channels safe to watch anymore are the Food Network and HGTV. The worst beating you’ll see on Emeril Live is a meringue in process; the most violent act on Landscapers Challenge is the brutal ripping-out of a crummy deck. The landscaping shows on HGTV are mesmerizing, the sort of armchair gardening that is perfect for those evenings when you have had it with your own plot of land. Those enterprising HGTVers have now turned to books, and there’s much to absorb in Landscape Makeovers: 50 Projects for a Picture-Perfect Yard (Meredith, $19.95, 224 pages, ISBN 0696217643), edited by Marilyn Rogers.

This book gives the details of projects you may have seen on HGTV programs. Curb appeal, privacy, overcoming problem areas there are tons of ideas in here to help make your landscape beautiful. Each project is rated in difficulty, time, cost and skills required. Landscape Makeovers is as satisfying as a night watching HGTV. Unlike the shows, however, this book explains exactly how to achieve the results you want. In this book, all seems possible.

The ultimate in patience Sometimes, impatience is bad for the environment. Terrible, in fact. Now that I have read The Gardener’s A-Z Guide to Growing Organic Food by Tanya L.K. Denckla (Storey, $22.95, 484 pages, ISBN 1580173705), I promise I will never spray my roses again with that toxic, brain-eating stuff. It only takes a few minutes to pick off those Japanese beetles, and all the good bugs in my garden will thank me.

Denckla is such a gentle advocate for organic gardening that you can’t help but want to try it, too. There is nothing shrill or dogmatic about the way she explains her subject. She debunks all the myths of organic gardening (it’s expensive/difficult/time consuming) with sensible truths, and the result is this manifesto of how to grow food that is in tune with nature.

In the book, Denckla reveals her own evolution as an organic gardener. Wanting to learn about the old ways, she began collecting information, and after four years, she discovered she had a book. A wonderful one, in fact. She explains how to grow every imaginable vegetable, nut and fruit, explaining the importance of rotating crops, planting a diverse garden and growing certain plant allies near each other. There’s a rogues’ gallery of evil pests, with non-toxic remedies; a list of plants that grow well together allies; and appendices full of organic gardening standards and resources. You will learn a lot with this book, and it may change the way you treat your garden.

A soggy epilogue At the end of Ken Druse’s Passion for Gardening is a stunning photograph of his garden, his beloved garden, flooded by the river that runs beside it. However traumatic this was for him (it had to be akin to Hemingway losing a manuscript), he writes about it with equanimity. I am taking to heart his conclusion: “I am indeed the junior partner in this collaboration with nature” a partnership that requires nothing but patience. Ann Shayne is a former editor of BookPage. She tends her garden in Nashville.

Books that soothe the itch to get back in the dirt Anybody who loves to garden is having a hard time right now. Here in the mid-South, March gives up a few days so mild that I can’t help but get outside and dig something. The last frost doesn’t come until mid-April, but that never […]
Business & Finance

Looking for that dream job

Review by bookpagedev

If your goal is to make sure the graduate in your life eventually finds gainful employment, the book to give is The Intern Files: How to Get, Keep, and Make the Most of Your Internship. Author Jamie Fedorko wrote the book after completing his own internship, and it’s filled with been-there, made-that-mistake advice. From the practical (preparing your resume) to the personal (hooking up with another intern), The Intern Files covers it all, and explains how important internships can be in securing that dream job and in discovering what you want to do with your life. After all, isn’t that what college is all about?

If your goal is to make sure the graduate in your life eventually finds gainful employment, the book to give is The Intern Files: How to Get, Keep, and Make the Most of Your Internship. Author Jamie Fedorko wrote the book after completing his own internship, and it’s filled with been-there, made-that-mistake advice. From the […]
Social Science

Shedding light on the working poor

Review by bookpagedev

The American Myth tells us that anyone who works hard and lives sensibly can achieve financial well being in the United States. Those who fail have only themselves to blame. The American Anti-Myth tells us the opposite: poverty is the fault of society. The poor face a rigid system that makes it close to impossible for them to rise.

Writer David K. Shipler identifies those two competing visions in The Working Poor: Invisible in America and proceeds to demolish both. He persuasively demonstrates through scores of compelling examples that the real answer is “all of the above.” The system is rigged, and people make terrible decisions. The common problems low wages, poor health care and housing, bad education, clueless parenting, sexual abuse, addictions are interlocking, creating what Shipler calls “the destructive synergy of many hardships.” Shipler, a former New York Times reporter, approaches the topic like the journalist he is, with profiles of a wide range of people struggling to get by. The tales of their lives are heartbreaking. Take Caroline from New Hampshire, a hard-working striver trying to support a learning-disabled daughter who was molested by her father. With little education, overwhelming burdens and a need for instant gratification, she moves from one dead-end job to another. Claudio, an illegal immigrant from Mexico working in the farm fields of North Carolina, lives with his wife in a cinderblock camp; together the couple is paid a total of $40 a day after deductions for “expenses.” They owe $2,300 to the “coyote” who smuggled them here, and have a sick 14-month old at home. Most of Working Poor is descriptive, but Shipler has a strong point of view, and his last chapter offers provocative prescriptions. His “holistic remedies” would include minimum wage rates that vary by region, sophisticated job training, a radical change in school funding and universal health insurance. Not everyone will agree. But at the least, his well-researched book should make the working poor a little less invisible. Anne Bartlett is a journalist who lives in South Florida.

The American Myth tells us that anyone who works hard and lives sensibly can achieve financial well being in the United States. Those who fail have only themselves to blame. The American Anti-Myth tells us the opposite: poverty is the fault of society. The poor face a rigid system that makes it close to impossible […]
Business & Finance

More changes

Review by bookpagedev

If you are thinking of quitting work once you have a baby, or have already quit to have a baby and wonder how to get back in the workforce, attorney Monica Samuels and journalist J.C. Conklin have you in mind. In Comeback Moms: How to Leave Work, Raise Children, and Jumpstart Your Career Even if You Haven’t Had a Job in Years they dispense good advice for making a graceful exit from work when you’re taking time off to be a full-time mom, and sound strategies for a smooth re-entry into the workforce. Although the authors devote much of the book to helping you manage workplace changes, including boss and co-worker expectations, they also discuss the impact on your personal life. They deal squarely with uncomfortable issues such as possible spousal resentment when you’re not working, dealing with friends and relatives who might question your decisions and sorting out your self-definition, desires and goals as you make the transitions. Delivered in a friendly style, the book draws on experiences of working mothers from many professions, and provides insights from career counselors, economists and employers. The authors discuss the range of options for going back to work: full- or part-time, changing careers and becoming an entrepreneur. Ellen R. Marsden writes from Mason, Ohio.

If you are thinking of quitting work once you have a baby, or have already quit to have a baby and wonder how to get back in the workforce, attorney Monica Samuels and journalist J.C. Conklin have you in mind. In Comeback Moms: How to Leave Work, Raise Children, and Jumpstart Your Career Even if […]
Social Science

Black and white: opposing views on racial identity

Review by bookpagedev

Two intriguing new books one by an outspoken African-American journalist and another by an equally candid civil rights activist offer starkly different views on race relations in America. The End of Blackness by Debra Dickerson and Quitting America by Randall Robinson explore the many ways in which African-Americans have been maligned, discriminated against and mistreated. However, Dickerson and Robinson disagree strongly on who or what is responsible for the plight of African Americans and what should be done to change it.

Dickerson, a former Air Force intelligence officer and a Harvard Law grad, is a journalist known for her bluntness, particularly on issues of race and gender. In a critically acclaimed memoir, An American Story (2000), she revealed her own circuitous route to success as a black woman and accepted responsibility for most of her personal and professional failings. In The End of Blackness: Returning the Souls of Black Folk to Their Rightful Owners, Dickerson argues that some African Americans are so mired in past wrongs done to them that they are unwilling and/or unable to move forward and work to improve their status. “Blacks simply do not know who and how to be absent oppression,” Dickerson writes in characteristically straightforward fashion. “To cease invoking racism and reveling in its continuance is to lose the power to haunt whites, the one tattered possession they’ll fight for while their true freedom molders unclaimed. It is to lose the power to define themselves as the opposite of something evil, rather than on their own terms.” For Dickerson, the solution is in self-reliance, with African Americans working to free themselves from what constrains and limits them, focusing on the future rather than the past. She urges African Americans to look inside in order to find the answers to problems on the outside, never defining themselves solely on the basis of race. As for the expected backlash her ideas will bring from fellow African Americans, Dickerson says she would welcome the opportunity to debate her critics.

Randall Robinson takes an equally caustic approach to espousing his views about race, but reaches a dramatically different conclusion. In Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man from His Native Land, Robinson explains why he lost hope and literally “quit” the U.S. Disgusted, aggravated and burnt out, Robinson left the country and relocated to the Caribbean island of St. Kitts where his wife was born.

For Robinson, the decision to leave was the culmination of years of resentment toward his treatment as a black man and civil rights advocate in America. Experiences such as being forced to sit at the back of the bus and being denied courteous service at a restaurant or department store contributed to his rage. He angrily tells stories about his protest marches, hunger strikes and political rallies through the years most of which were fruitless, his cries for change falling on deaf ears.

Robinson provides many sobering and grim statistics about injustice and inequality in America. “In a country that just squandered more than two hundred billion dollars on a war of dubious legality, forty-three million Americans sixteen percent of the population are without health care insurance,” he writes. “One in four blacks, including those who need health care insurance most, the poorest, are wholly unprotected.” Quitting America is a sharp contrast to Robinson’s 2002 book, The Reckoning: What Blacks Owe to Each Other, in which he encourages African-Americans to speak out and support each other in eradicating crime and poverty from urban America. At this point, Robinson has simply given up on America and believes that the only way for people of color to thrive and succeed is to vacate this country for greener, or perhaps, blacker, and friendlier pastures elsewhere.

Glenn Townes is a journalist based in New Jersey.

Two intriguing new books one by an outspoken African-American journalist and another by an equally candid civil rights activist offer starkly different views on race relations in America. The End of Blackness by Debra Dickerson and Quitting America by Randall Robinson explore the many ways in which African-Americans have been maligned, discriminated against and mistreated. […]
Social Science

Asking the big questions

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

In the modern board game of Life, players come to a fork in the journey very early on: get a job or go to college. If they choose college, they might find a higher-paying job in the long run, but they’ll have to take out loans and pile up debt before ever collecting a paycheck. Players might start a family along life’s road, but whichever fork they choose, unlike real life, always leads to retirement and never to death.

The Mansion of Happiness—the prototype for Life—was the most popular board game in 19th-century Britain, and while it was more moralistic than its later American counterpart, it raised many of the same questions about this journey called life. With her characteristically vivid storytelling, New Yorker writer Jill Lepore uses this British game to embark on a stunning meditation on three questions that have dominated serious reflection about human nature and culture for centuries: How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when we die?

Lepore proceeds by exploring the stages of life from before birth, infancy and childhood to growing up, growing old, dying and life after death. For example, she examines 17th-century physician William Harvey’s discovery that human life begins with an egg (as opposed to the long-held belief that humans germinated from seeds), and illustrates the ways that such an idea came to have significant political consequences for women by the latter half of the 20th century. She focuses on the Karen Ann Quinlan case to show how the definitions of life and death—once the province of religion—were suddenly decided not in a hospital or a church but in a courtroom.

Through these stories, Lepore demonstrates how the contemplation of life and death moved from the library to the laboratory, so that scientific narratives of progress now promise a different sort of eternity—right up to the vague idea that one day, when the Earth dies, humans will simply move to outer space. In The Mansion of Happiness, Lepore’s refreshing and often humorous insights breathe fresh air into these everlasting matters.

In the modern board game of Life, players come to a fork in the journey very early on: get a job or go to college. If they choose college, they might find a higher-paying job in the long run, but they’ll have to take out loans and pile up debt before ever collecting a paycheck. […]

Want more BookPage?

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Trending Nonfiction

All Nonfiction

Author Interviews

More Interviews

Recent Features

All Features