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Vaughn Public Library - Ashland

Orwell's roses

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Language:
English
Description
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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ISBN:
9780593083369
9780593166550
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Grouping Information

Grouped Work ID34c3b460-4da3-f28e-77c1-00a48093692a
Grouping Titleorwells roses
Grouping Authorrebecca solnit
Grouping Categorybook
Grouping LanguageEnglish (eng)
Last Grouping Update2024-03-29 04:39:12AM
Last Indexed2024-03-28 05:53:38AM

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Solnit, Rebecca
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Ashland Vaughn Public Library
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Ashland Adult Nonfiction
Online OverDrive Collection
display_description
"A fresh take on George Orwell as a far more nature-loving figure than is often portrayed, and a dazzlingly rich meditation on roses, gardens, and the value and use of beauty and pleasure in the face of brutality and horror. "In the spring of 1936 a man planted roses." That man was George Orwell, shortly before he went off to fight against fascism in Spain. Today, those rosebushes are still thriving. This is the starting point for Rebecca Solnit's new book, which presents another side of Orwell, a neglected arcadian Orwell who took enormous pleasure in the natural world and found great meaning and value in it. Orwell's planting of the roses is an axle from which Solnit's chapters radiate out like spokes as she brilliantly explores its various contexts, perspectives, and meanings, following the contours of Orwell's life and tracking how deeply enmeshed the love of nature is in all his writing. Journeying to the cottage in Wallingford where Orwell lived in 1936, she examines his desire to be agrarian and settled, how gardening restored him, and how planting something can be an act of fidelity and faith. Probing at the beauty and meaning of roses, she draws in the revolutionary photography and politics of Tina Modotti and makes a clandestine visit to a Columbian rose factory, where 80% of America's roses for sale are grown. She tracks the history of gardening, showing how the desire to garden is culturally determined and often rooted in class, recounts the immense battles over breeding and genetics in Russia during Stalin's time, and probes into the colonialist roots of Orwell's forebears, who worked in opium production in India and profiteered from sugar and slavery in Jamaica. Solnit shows how these points of intersection illuminate Orwell's work, and how that illumination shines forth on larger questions about beauty, pleasure, meaning, relationship, and hope. Her book establishes that "Orwellian" could stand for something more than ominous, corrupt, and sinister"--
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Book
eAudiobook
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Audio Books
Books
eBook
id
34c3b460-4da3-f28e-77c1-00a48093692a
isbn
9780593083369
9780593166550
itype_ashland
BOOK - HARDCOVER
last_indexed
2024-03-28T10:53:38.789Z
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-1
literary_form
Non Fiction
literary_form_full
Non Fiction
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Ashland Vaughn Public Library
Ashland Vaughn Public Library Online
owning_location_ashland
Ashland Vaughn Public Library
Online OverDrive Collection
primary_isbn
9780593083369
publishDate
2021
publisher
Books on Tape
Viking
recordtype
grouped_work
subject_facet
Authors, English -- 20th century -- Biography
Biographies
Gardening
Nature
Orwell, George, -- 1903-1950
Orwell, George, -- 1903-1950 -- Homes and haunts
Orwell, George, -- 1903-1950 -- Knowledge and learning
Roses
title_display
Orwell's roses
title_full
Orwell's Roses
Orwell's roses / Rebecca Solnit
title_short
Orwell's roses
topic_facet
Authors, English
Biography & Autobiography
Gardening
Homes and haunts
Knowledge and learning
Literary Criticism
Nature
Nonfiction
Orwell, George
Roses

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