Aktion	Zweigstelle	Standorte	Status	Frist	Vorbestellungen
Vorbestellen	Zweigstelle: 07., Urban-Loritz-Pl. 2a	Standorte: GS.BU Soln / College 3a - Englisch / Regal 3a-2	Status: Verfügbar	Frist:	Vorbestellungen: 0

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

 

Table of Contents

I The Prophet and the Hedgehog

One Day of the Dead

3 (12)

Two Flower Power

15 (6)

Three Lilacs and Nazis

21 (30)

II Going Underground

One Smoke, Shale, Ice, Mud, Ashes

51 (6)

Two Carboniferous

57 (6)

Three In Darkness

63 (14)

III Bread and Roses

One Roses and Revolution

77 (8)

Two We Fight for Roses Too

85 (6)

Three In Praise Of

91 (10)

Four Buttered Toast

101 (8)

Five The Last Rose of Yesterday

109 (12)

IV Stalin's Lemons

One The Flint Path

121 (10)

Two Empire of Lies

131 (12)

Three Forcing Lemons

143 (6)

V Retreats and Attacks

One Enclosures

149 (8)

Two Gentility

157 (8)

Three Sugar, Poppies, Teak

165 (6)

Four Old Blush

171 (8)

Five Flowers of Evil

179 (8)

VI The Price of Roses

One Beauty Problems

187 (8)

Two In the Rose Factory

195 (10)

Three The Crystal Spirit

205 (8)

Four The Ugliness of Roses

213 (8)

Five Snow and Ink

221 (14)

VII The River Orwell

One An Inventory of Pleasures

235 (16)

Two "As the Rose-Hip to the Rose"

251 (14)

Three The River Orwell

265 (4)

Gratitude 269 (4)

Notes 273 (22)

Image Credits 295 (2)

Index 297