Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography "An
exhilarating romp through Orwell's life and times and also through
the life and times of roses." -Margaret Atwood "A captivating
account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious
thinker." -Claire Messud, Harper's "Nobody who reads it will ever
think of Nineteen Eighty-Four in quite the same way." -Vogue A lush
exploration of politics, roses, and pleasure, and a fresh take on
George Orwell as an avid gardener whose political writing was
grounded by his passion for the natural world "In the spring of
1936, a writer planted roses." So be-gins Rebecca Solnit's new
book, a reflection on George Orwell's passionate gardening and the
way that his involvement with plants, particularly flowers,
illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and
on the intertwined politics of nature and power. Sparked by her
unexpected encounter with the roses he reportedly planted in 1936,
Solnit's account of this overlooked aspect of Orwell's life
journeys through his writing and his actions-from going deep into
the coal mines of England, fighting in the Spanish Civil War,
critiquing Stalin when much of the international left still
supported him (and then critiquing that left) to his analysis of
the relationship between lies and authoritarianism. Through
Solnit's celebrated ability to draw unexpected connections, readers
are drawn onward from Orwell's own work as a writer and gardener to
encounter photographer Tina Modotti's roses and her politics,
agriculture and illusion in the USSR of his time with forcing
lemons to grow in impossibly cold conditions, Orwell's slave-owning
ancestors in Jamaica, Jamaica Kincaid's examination of colonialism
and imperialism in the flower garden, and the brutal rose industry
in Colombia that supplies the American market. The book draws to a
close with a rereading of Nineteen Eighty-Four that completes
Solnit's portrait of a more hopeful Orwell, as well as offering a
meditation on pleasure, beauty, and joy as acts of resistance.
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