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Reviews Reader-to-Reader: Capsule Reviews Mimi Schwartz This column invites readers to share theirfavorite nonfiction books in print. Memoirs, travel writing, nature writing, essay collections, biography, adventure stories—all are welcome here as mini-reviews of new books and oldfavorites still in print. Our aim is to keep the best nonfiction alive in a reader-to-reader kind of way. Gail Ullman There are gardeners who write with passion, and there are writers who garden with passion. For readers, like me, who love to garden, the latter group is a delight—especiaUy on a winter afternoon when the garden's soil lies frozen. Thinking about what books I might review for this column has led me to ponder the ways writers have addressed what is, after aU, a relatively unvarying subject matter. Is it simply good writing that distinguishes some creative nonfiction about gardening? Is it a unique voice or sensibility? Must the gardener/writer be a likable person? Alas, I offer no answers, only three books—each intensely satisfying—whose writers take very different approaches to a gardening life. Each is a good read for that wintry afternoon. My Vegetable Love:AJournal ofa Growing Season, by Carl H. Klaus. University of Iowa Press, 2000. 344 pages, paper, $19.95. Klaus is a skilled writer (founding director ofthe University ofIowa nonfiction program) who chooses the format of a daybook to describe his gar208 Book Reviews209 den activities from March through November of 1995. The chronological frame emphasizes and enhances the seasonal rhythm that is one ofthe satisfactions for gardeners. For Klaus the writer, the frame establishes a point of departure to observe the everyday business of living. At the beginning, roughly the vernal equinox, a warm speU has aUowed the earliest ever seeding of the radishes—Cherry BeUe, French Breakfast—in a sun spot against a neighbor's garage. Simultaneously, Spring Break has begun, and, as he plants, Klaus wonders whether his light course-load has earned him a break and considers his decision to retire in a year. As the season progresses, the polyester covers come off the rows of vegetables, the rains come, the droughts foUow, deer maraud, ravenous groundhogs and pesky squirrels are routinely moved in humane traps to the countryside. Centered amongst family, neighbors, colleagues, health concerns, aging pets, the gardener soldiers on, celebrating his successes and giving little time to the failures (as gardeners learn to do). By November, the gardener has bowed to the inevitability that the tomato plants must die, the basement shelves are laden with preserves to tide him through the winter, the mulch has been spread, and the polyester covers folded for another season. This daybook is a glorious tribute to vegetables—growing them, cooking them, eating them—by a sensitive and perceptive writer who knows how to make a Brandywine tomato sound downright irresistible. My Garden (Book), by Jamaica Kincaid. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999. 229 pages, cloth, $23.00. For her second Mother's Day, Kincaid's husband gave her a hoe, a rake, a spade, a fork, and some seeds, and in this way—and only in this way— Kincaid begins at the beginning of an account ofher absorbing love of gardens . This book shares with Carl Klaus's an intensely personal approach to the subject, but here the rhythm is in the lilt ofthe prose, not the change of the season. Instead of systematic progression through the season, the reader is tossed forward and back by the vigor ofan unconstrained imagination that was formed in the Caribbean but must come to grips with aVermont landscape . I loved this book, but find it difficult to describe Kincaid. We have read the same books, loved the same landscapes, visited the same gardens here and abroad; we've done the things that "sophisticated" gardeners do. But Kincaid's fierce, idiosyncratic voice situates her in a very different place from any writer I've known. This book sparkles with love, wit, rage, and 210Fourth Genre deep inteUigence. The reader wiU learn a good bit about the author. The reader wiU not, however, learn how to grow dahlias. Dear Friend & Gardener: Letters on Life and Gardening, by Beth Chatto and Christopher Lloyd...

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