Synopses & Reviews
Review
"A tour de force...a magical accomplishment by an alchemist of ideas and words, images and truth." --Michael Pakenham, The Baltimore Sun
Review
"Inspired...In America [is] a counter-romance, alternately hilarious and tragic."
--Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair
Review
"[In America] has an invigorating spaciousness...packed with characters, incidents, and color, and combining mass appeal with high intelligence." -Walter Kirn, New York magazine
Review
"Enough incident, psychology, local color and fascinating detail to stock a flotilla of popular novels, a couple of 'Ragtimes' and a brace of theatrical memoirs." -Michael Silverblatt, Los Angeles Times Book Review
Review
"What is wonderful about the book is...[the] counterpoint of novelist and essayist, of innocence and knowingness. From the knowingness comes another excellence of In America, its cat's cradle of meanings." -Joan Acocella, The New Yorker
Review
"Vividly inquisitive...An exhilarating journey into the past, freighted with dazzling detail, the product of an endlessly inquisitive, historical imagination." -The Economist
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Synopsis
An award-winning journalist pens a fascinating account of the life and times of Thomas Fairchild, a London nurseryman who discovered hybridization and paved the way for the growth of gardening as a cultural obsession. 8-page color photo insert.
About the Author
Michael Leapman is an award-winning journalist who writes on gardening and other topics for several newspapers and magazines, including The Economist, The Garden, and Gardens Illustrated. He is a former editor of The Times Diary and was also the paper's New York correspondent. An authority on London, he has written and edited a number of books about the city including London's River and Eyewitness Guide to London. His first book, One Man and His Plot, was about the allotment in Brixton, South London, which he and his wife Olga still cultivate.