Адам Николсон0.0 A bestselling author's passionate memoir about restoring life to one of the world's greatest gardens Sissinghurst Castle is a jewel in the English countryside. Its chief attraction is its celebrated garden, designed in the 1930s by the poet Vita Sackville-West, lover of Virginia Woolf. As a boy, Adam Nicolson, Sackville-West's grandson, spent his days romping through Sissinghurst's woods, streams, and fields. In this book, he returns to the place of his bucolic youth and finds that the estate, now operated by Britain's National Trust, has lost something precious. It is still unquestionably a place of calm and beauty but, he asks, where is the working farm, the orchards, the cattle and sheep? Nicolson convinces the Trust to embrace a simple idea: Grow lunch for the two hundred thousand annual visitors. Sissinghurst is a personal biography of a place and an inspiring story of one man's quest to return a remarkable landscape to its best, most useful purpose. Nicolson is an entertaining and charming writer and this book will capture fans of Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.
Сара Уайз0.0 An enthralling account of the most notorious slum in Victorian England—and how it became a laboratory for "reforming" the poor
Condemned as a "fruitful hotbed of disease and death," the Old Nichol, a fifteen-acre East London slum, was a shameful blot on the age of progress. A maze of rotting hundred-year-old houses, the Old Nichol suffered rampant crime and a death rate four times that of London. Among the more piquant discoveries of an 1887 government inquiry was that the owners of these fetid dwellings included lords, lawyers, even churchmen.
Drawing on a rich archival store, Sarah Wise reconstructs the Old Nichol and the lives of its 6,000 inhabitants—the woodworkers, fish smokers, and dog dealers, whose tiny rooms doubled as workshops and farmyards. She depicts as well the eugenicists, anarchists, and philanthropists who ventured into the Old Nichol to "save" the poor with such theories as emigration and sterilization. The winning solution was demolition: the Old Nichol was replaced with a new, hygienic settlement—in which only eleven of the original residents could afford to live. Widely praised as a sensitive chronicler of the poor, Wise captures the moment when the poor turned from public nuisance into social experiment.
Ian McDonald0.0 Ian McDonald is South America's equivalent of Robert Frost a poet writing in a young country who, with an open heart, has set down its characters and events, its landscape, traditions, and myths, for future generations to discover. Published for the poet's seventy-fifth birthday, this volume sets the poems from McDonald's four collections in chronological order for the first time.
Александра Фуллер0.0 From the bestselling author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and Scribbling the Cat, the unforgettable true story of a boy who comes of age in the oil-fields and open plains of Wyoming; a heartrending story of the human spirit that lays bare where it is that wisdom truly resides.
Colton H. Bryant was one of Wyoming's native sons and grown by that high, dry place, he never once wanted to leave it. "Wyoming loves me," he said, and it was true. Wyoming—roughneck, wild, open, and searingly beautiful—loved him, and Colton loved it back. As a child in school, Colton never could force himself to focus on his lessons. Instead, he'd plan where he'd go fishing later, or he'd wonder how many jackrabbits he might find on his favorite hunting patch, or he'd dream about the rides he would take on the wild mare he was breaking. "At my funeral, you'll all feel sorry for making me waste so much time in school," he said to his best friend Jake—and it was true.
Two things got Colton through the boredom of school and the neighborhood "K-mart cowboys" who bullied him: His best friend Jake and his favorite mantra, a snatch of a saying he heard on TV: Mind over matter, which meant to him: If you don't mind, it don't matter. Colton and Jake grew up wanting nothing more than the freedom to sleep out under the great Wyoming night sky, to hunt and fish and chase the horizon and to be just like Colton's dad, a strong and gentle man of few words. When it was time for Colton to marry and make money on his own, he took up as a hand on an oil rig. It was dangerous work, but Colton was the third generation in his family to work on the oil patch and he claimed it was in his blood. And anyway, he joked, he always knew he'd die young.
Colton did die young, and he died on the rig, falling to his death because the drilling company had neglected to spend two thousand dollars on the mandated safety rails that would have saved his life. His family received no compensation. But they didn't expect to—they knew the company's ways, and after all as Colton would have said: Mind over matter.
In Scribbling the Cat, Alexandra Fuller brought us the examined life of a Rhodesian soldier; now, in her inimitable poetic voice and with her pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, she brings before us the life of someone much closer to home, as unexpected as he is iconic. The moving, tough, and in many ways quintessentially American story of Colton H. Bryant's life could not be told without also telling the story of the land that grew him—the beautiful and somehow tragic Wyoming; the land where there are still such things as cowboys roaming the plains, where it's relationships that get you through, and where a just, soulful, passionate man named Colton H. Bryant lived and died.
James Buchan0.0 When mysterious loner Jim Smith moves into remote Paradise Farmhouse, he experiences some strange but wonderful midnight visits from an ethereal woman. He soon discovers that this dream-like figure is the incarnation of a 1960s beauty, immortalized in a famous nude portrait that belongs to his neighbour. Intrigued, Jim abandons his customary aloofness to find out more, and accepts a dinner invitation from his landlords - a billionaire-thug and his beautiful but mistreated wife. The dinner party - a chance for a brilliantly satirical sketch of the braying upper class hunting set - is disastrous and, soon after, Jim's pastoral idyll disintegrates. His lambs die. Cows give no milk. Bees swarm. Sensing his ghostly lover has turned malevolent, Jim knows he must placate her before the circle of decay reaches those he loves - even if that means making the ultimate sacrifice. Both unsettling ghost story and intense love story, The Gate of Air is by turns poetic, learned, satirical and allegorical. This is a beautifully crafted novel about love and loneliness, life and death, and the indelible traces we leave behind us when we die.
Лора Битти0.0 Pollard tells the story of Anne, a bag lady, seen in the town as one of the older ones from 'la la land'. Long ago, when she was fifteen, she ran away and made her life alone in the woods. It is her narrative that the reader hears, as Anne survives her first winter. She makes a shelter with her own hands, and decorates it; she forages for things to eat, experiences the pangs of love, watches the foxes and the deer and the changing seasons as the years go by. And in the wood there are other voices: the forest itself, the night, a man with a gun, boys splashing in pools ... and the sound of distant chain-saws, heralding footpaths under the trees and walkways in the canopy.
Laura Beatty has a gift for empathy and for challenging the reader. This is writing of the highest calibre.
