Book Review: Notes From an Italian Garden by Joan Marble

I love the story of how Boston-born journalist Joan Marble first became obsessed with gardening ... adding one little potted plant after another to her small Roman balcony. Finally, she and her husband bought a piece of land north of Rome and built a summer home there, so she could expand her plant collection.

The land was dense, red clay -- terrible for gardening. We're talking pick-axes. In fact, they had to dynamite holes to plant the long rows of cypress trees lining the driveway. But Joan and an assortment of helpers persisted. This memoir, written 30 years after the founding of the garden, gives a behind-the-scenes look at how it evolved, and the lessons learned and friends made along the way.

My favorite part describes her research into green houses for warmer climates. You can't use a traditional glass greenhouse in the Mediterranean because your plants will fry. Instead, you have to create a shady-greenhouse. Joan's sounds delicious, but I do wish she'd included some actual blueprints or photographs to illustrate. The book is packed with artistic line drawings which are pretty, but not much help for me at least.

Book Review: Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr

This book is exquisite, luminous, dazzling, poetic, enthralling. It is literature with a capital L. I almost feel as though it should be perfumed with a subtle yet intoxicating scent and cost at least $100 a page.

It's awfully, awfully well written and a vast pleasure to read. (These two things don't always go together you know.)

On the day Anthony and his wife came home from the Boise Idaho hospital with their newly born twins, he received a letter informing him he'd won the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters (a prize he'd been unaware he was up for) which included a free apartment plus writing studio in Rome for an entire year, as well as a stipend to live on.

This book is the story of that year, an insomniac's diary of what it's like to be a new parent in a strange city in a foreign land, as well as what it's like to be an artist working, and sometimes failing to work, at your craft in such an exotic place. Snowfall in the coliseum, fresh fava beans at the greenmarket, a child's first step, 13 obelisks, white gloved policemen, a funeral at the Vatican, pediatricians who make housecalls on Vespas, Caravaggio, peacocks and parrots, Pliny, four-hour dinners, "hopelessly good antipasti"... it's all in there.

You'll adore this book if you:
- Are an armchair traveler yearning for the next best thing to actually being in Rome yourself.
- Are the parent of twin infants (although you won't have time to read it.)
- Want a behind-the-scenes look into the everyday life and creative process of an award-winning 30-something novelist.

Book Review: Dome of Many-Coloured Glass by Post Wheeler & Hallie Erminie Rives

In years past, the best used book sale in Washington DC was run by a non-profit arm of the State Department. All the foreign service personnel and spouses would donate books - it was so huge they had to rent the biggest hall in town. If you've lived overseas you can understand why. Books in English are better than Godiva chocolates, so you collect an awful lot of them.

Foreign service officers and their spouses tend to live more exciting lives than most of us and then write books about themselves, which they all in turn collect, and then, when they get old, donate to the booksale. So there's that too.

At my very first Foreign Service booksale, so many years ago that I was in my 20s and living in a one-bedroom apartment within walking distance to the White House, I picked up a copy of 'Dome of Many-Coloured Glass' a diplomatic memoir. I think I liked the heft of the book (860-pages, not including index with tantilizing entries such as 'Anathan, Baroness d' pages 277, 445, 561") as much as I adored the scent of its yellowing pages.

Even in 1955, when it was first published, this autobiography must have been unusual in that husband and wife, both well-published authors, shared the stage. Each one tells the story of a diplomatic posting from their own perspective, the husband who is the diplomatic officer and the wife who must 'pay, pack and follow' as well as create a vibrant social life. Their postings, including Japan, London, The Arctic, Rome, Russia, Paraguay, Sweden and Albania, were extraordinary, and held at extraordinary times in the first half of the 20th century.

This book is no longer in print and second-hand copies are sometimes hard to come by, but you'll find the search is well worth it if you're interested in:

- international relations in the first half of the 20th century.

- what it was like being a diplomatic spouse back when men were diplomats and women were "helpmeets" (and boy did they help!)

- office politics at the US State Department. (Ugly, mean, tough.)

- High society in Japan, Sweden, et al, back when the Wheelers were circulating in it.