Review by Booklist Review
A devoted vegetable gardener and esteemed professor with the Iowa writing program acknowledges and thoughtfully records the seasonal chores connected with planting and tending that lend symmetry to each day. Klaus' journal, spanning one full growing season, integrates the mundane along with the profound as Klaus mentally prepares for retirement and deals with a mixed diagnosis of his wife's possible reccurrence of cancer. Interactions with colleagues, friends, family, and cherished pets pepper these musings on the process and progress of a well-planned and most definitely well-cared-for vegetable garden. Whether one fusses over flower beds or relishes freshly picked produce for savory meals, all gardeners will be able to relate to the setbacks and successes chronicled here. --Alice Joyce
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Home gardeners, cooks and nature lovers will savor this delightful account of the 1995 growing season in Iowa. Klaus, director of the nonfiction writing program at the University of Iowa, kept a daily record, March through November, of his large vegetable garden. Spring in Iowa City was unusually cold and wet; Klaus depended heavily on row covers to protect his young plants. Summer brought heat, drought and "critters"squirrels, woodchucks, opossums and deer. Then, a bountiful harvest that extends to Thanksgiving. The book goes beyond tending a garden; Klaus interweaves personal details and concerns of his daily life: he writes about neighbors, his wife's probable recurring cancer, the last weeks leading to the death of his 20-year-old cat, generational conflicts in his department at the university and the meals he concocts from his vegetable bounty. Delectable. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Klaus, an experienced gardener and director of the nonfiction writing program at the University of Iowa, took a research leave in 1994 to write about his vegetable gardening activities in Iowa City from March through November. Explaining why he gardens, Klaus records daily not only the planting, tending, and harvesting of his garden but also the everyday human influences (family, colleagues, friends, pets) that often affect a gardener. For Klaus, vegetable gardening is part of a daily routine that links many experiences in the life of a writer, husband, and father. This thoughtful book is recommended for popular gardening collections.Dale Luchsinger, Athens Area Technical Inst., Ga. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A serenely informal gardener's companion. Klaus, who was director of the nonfiction writing program at the Univ. of Iowa before his recent retirement, is a specialist in the personal essay. His book collects almost a year's worth of brief daily reflections on his Iowa vegetable garden, beginning on March 16, 1995, and concluding on November 24. Unlike other practitioners of the popular garden journal genre, Klaus isn't beguiled by prettiness, either as a grower or as a writer; his pragmatism is reassuringly free of adjectival abandon. This is about as elated as he ever becomes: ``The most important news of the day is that I finished transplanting the tomatoes this afternoon.'' Similarly down-to-the-ground are his notes on marauding groundhogs, never-ending rain, and 100-year-old manure, suggesting common frets and pleasures without rhetorical swoons. Reading him is comforting because he invokes a too easily forgotten seasonal rhythm, page after page, and also because Klaus is very good at introducing human mortality into nature's timelessness as a consistent sidelong subject. He never whines, not even when discussing the serious illnesses of dog, cat, and wife. After some hours spent gardening, dinner is always waiting, and this-- virtuously, yet not prissily--seems like enough: ``Bloody Marys made with our own homemade tomato juice, to go with . . . salmon mousse from a poached Atlantic fillet, the organic endives from California (garlic-stuffed, pimento-stuffed, and Italian-spiced greens), and pumpernickel rye from the Lithuanian bakery in Omaha.'' Any gardener, true-blue or armchair variety, will want to settle down and read Klaus.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
