Overview

"My Vegetable Love offers a detailed daily record of gardenng, loving, and living during a single growing season--from the first outdoor planting in early spring to the final fall harvest shortly after Thanksgiving. Yet Klaus describes far more than the toils and triumphs of tending vegetables, as his observations encompass the day-to-day changes in weather and wildlife as well as the life changes in his pets, his wife, and himself. As Patricia Hampl wrote, ""Beneath the simplicity of this beguiling gardener's journal lies the captivating story of good life and true love. In the spirit of M. F. K. Fisher's writing about food and drink, Carl Klaus has found in his garden a model of the enduring passions of life and death."""

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9780877457077

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Reviews

A lovely memoir. Beautifully written, tender, and wise. Gerald Stern A gardener's touch [is] not required for enjoying a book that so wholeheartedly celebrates friendship, love, pets, the elements of family, academia, cooking, eating and of course, gardening Bon appetit and good reading. Smithsonian [A] steamy romance of vegetable gardening. BookPage A lovely memoir. Beautifully written, tender, and wise. --Gerald Stern [A] steamy romance of vegetable gardening. -- BookPage A gardener's touch [is] not required for enjoying a book that so wholeheartedly celebrates friendship, love, pets, the elements of family, academia, cooking, eating--and of course, gardening...Bon appetit--and good reading. -- Smithsonian A lovely memoir. Beautifully written, tender, and wise. -Gerald Stern A gardener's touch [is] not required for enjoying a book that so wholeheartedly celebrates friendship, love, pets, the elements of family, academia, cooking, eating-and of course, gardening...Bon appetit-and good reading. - Smithsonian [A] steamy romance of vegetable gardening. - BookPage

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. (Kirkus Reviews)

<p>&ldquo;A lovely memoir. Beautifully written, tender, and wise.&rdquo;&mdash;Gerald Stern

Author Information

Carl H. Klaus, founding director of the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program, professor emeritus at the University of Iowa, and coeditor of Sightline Books: The Iowa Series in Literary Nonfiction, is a diarist, essayist, and author or coauthor of several textbooks on writing. His nonfiction includes My Vegetable Love (Iowa paperback 2000) and its companion Weathering Winter (Iowa, 1997) as well as Taking Retirement: A Beginner's Diary and Letters to Kate: Life after Life (Iowa, 2006).

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