| Customer Reviews
The Less Than Perfect Passion What makes gardening a great hobby or an overwhelming passion is the promise of perfection. The road to a perfect garden starts years in advance with planning, plotting, and prodding and no guarantee of achieving the success that seems so attainable during the dead of winter. William Alexander's book "The $64 Tomato" has captured the essence of the quest and has done so in an extremely hilarious, often laugh-out-loud manner. If your passion is not gardening, it is still easy to recognize the fine border between an activity and an obsession in his bright and humorous memoir relating his adventures from buying his Hudson Valley home and planning the initial gardens to his struggles with landscapers, tools, earth, animals, family, and himself.^M
Madam, I'm Adam Not since Eden has any man been so troubled in a garden... William Alexander is an able and intelligent writer, and probably an able gardener as well, but this particular work seems to be nearly devoid of the joys of gardening that should outweigh the disasters and disappointments. ^M
Garden of Eden Working all day at a nearby research institute, sometimes Bill Alexander would have to gird his loins when he came home at sundown and still had all his gardening to do. He and his physician wife owned a patch of land neighboring boys used as a baseball field, but Alexander always had weekend dreams of turning it into a combination orchard and flower garden. Under the direction of a comically sketched landscape designer, he made his dreams come true, despite the skepticism of his sitcom-like kids, a teen girl and a slacker boy named Zach, characterized as living in a dank room filled with unwashed laundry. The kids don't really care--on the outside; but inside their hearts swell with pride as their dear old dad tames a recalcitrant patch of land into a Robert Creeley like garden of which Elizabeth Lawrence might have been proud.^M
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