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Rating: 
Summary: A 20th century Walden, but better.
Review: I'll have to confess a bias: I'm one of the author's sons. And the material is so close to me that its power is overwhelming, especially since the book came out only months before Dad died. Nonetheless, anyone I know who's read it feels the pull too. And the inimitable dry humor for which the author was reknowned permeates every chapter... the Editor at Stackpole Books wrote to tell me it had mesmerized everyone from the president to the receptionist. At first glance this might seem to be wholly concerned with trees and plants, intimating that one needs to be a horticulturist to appreciate it. Dead wrong! While there are numerous chapters about plant and animal life, these are not the dry, technical stuff one might suppose...they're infused with an attention to their connects to non-horticultural things, like literature, history, culture and everyday living. There are people too, some of whom might have stepped out of a Dickens novel. It's about the lessons and beauty of rural life -by an Atlantan suburbanite who knew nothing about it when he arrived. You might well consider this a 20th Century WALDEN (which it did not deliberately set out to be), except that this is more immediate and entertaining. Certainly much funnier (echoes of MR BLANDINGS BUILDS HIS DREAM HOUSE) and poignant, especially the final three chapters, where this whole idyllic landscape into which we've been immersed, confronts the gathering storm on the horizon.
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