From Library Journal
What does a thoughtful and serious gardener do instead of gardening in the wintertime in Iowa City? Lesser individuals might have flown off to the Caribbean to survive a Midwest freeze; Klaus (My Vegetable Love: A Journal of a Growing Season, LJ 8/96) instead contemplates the effects of wintertime on plants, animals, and people. Most Midwesterners garden only in their houses or minds during the early months of the year, but Klaus constantly plans for the coming growing months. Writing of an Iowa winter from December 31, 1994, to March 15, 1995, he reflects on the rhythms of life, showing how routines and work help one get through the bleak days. This individual perspective on winter is both a diary and insight into human existence. Readers in public libraries will find life here that will keep them looking forward to another spring and gardening season.?Dale Frederick Luchsinger, Milwaukee Area Technical Coll. Lib, Wis.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Scientific American
It's going to be a long winter.
Like winter-wary squirrels, gardeners are busily collecting literary acorns and stockpiling them for the long winter months. Winter is serious business for gardeners, and the trick is always in the rationing--how can long-awaited books be rationed and savored to coincide with the first spring rains.
Add Carl Klaus' new book to your growing stack. In Weathering Winter, Klaus helps all who are close to the soil come to terms with the harsh weather and chilly truths that winter brings. No stranger to the dormant season, Klaus understands the gardener's disposition toward it when he says that winter is "The season from hell, where beneath the fires in dante's inferno, lies the ninth circle, the lowest level, the place of eternal freezing cold." This reviewer hears a solemn "amen" murmured through the chapped lips of sympathetic gardeners everywhere.
Written as a companion book to My Vegetable Love, last year's literary success, Weathering Winter focuses on "our daily adventures in living close to the land, close to the bone, and close to the dining room table." In "A season so apparently at odds with the very thought of gardening," Klaus convinces us that winter does, in fact, offer a growing season for gardeners, a personal growing season, and that life should not be placed "temporarily on hold until spring."
Weathering Winter is a gardener's daybook, beginning December 31 and ending March 15, covering all the dismal days of cold and ice from a gardener's perspective. Like spoonfuls of hot chicken soup, Klaus' book warms the spirit, but it also makes us realize that gardeners needn't see themselves as victims of the season. Klaus certainly doesn't. He's an active participant in it. Creating memories and savoring experiences with his wife, Kate, the author awakens us to many of the high pleasures of winter when we feel closest to home, hearth, and kitchen. And, like the author, we see ourselves over-wintering along with our gardens, popping up into the attic to keep a watchful eye on geraniums we've carefully tucked away, making tomato sauce from our basil and garlic harvest, and taking chilly walks on starry nights."
