The Signature of All Things in Around the World in 80 Books

Nov 14, 2013 Lisa of Hopewell rated it it was ok

Shelves: audio-books, read-in-2014

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Dec 20, 2021 Lindsey Z rated it it was amazing

This is one of the most beautiful books I've read in a while. It continually filled me with wonder about the natural and human worlds, and its depth of emotion seeped so very far into my heart. Gilbert is an absolute exquisite prose writer. My god.

I will remember Alma and her very full, sometimes lonely, and always intrepid life for a long long time. 💜💜 ...more

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Jul 29, 2014 Mary rated it it was amazing

This author writes about foreign climes, societal shifts, the stubbornly elusive conundrum of family — in a delightful, overstuffed work. I did not at all like her previous book Eat, Pray,Love; but when an admired, all consuming reader friend recommended it, I had to follow her lead in reading it. I was enthralled it!

Alma Whittaker is that bearable kind of know-it-all — a child who truly does. The daughter of Henry Whittaker, a rough and lowly English orchardist's son turned American rare-botan This author writes about foreign climes, societal shifts, the stubbornly elusive conundrum of family — in a delightful, overstuffed work. I did not at all like her previous book Eat, Pray,Love; but when an admired, all consuming reader friend recommended it, I had to follow her lead in reading it. I was enthralled it!

Alma Whittaker is that bearable kind of know-it-all — a child who truly does. The daughter of Henry Whittaker, a rough and lowly English orchardist's son turned American rare-botanicals giant, Alma is raised by her sage Dutch mother and old-school drug baron father in the rarefied air of 1800s Philadelphia.

Her father's sprawling estate serves as Alma's intellectual training grounds, the library, laboratory and great minds of the day at her father's dinner table all fair game for dispute and debate. Henry's aggressive upbringing is tempered by the sober ministrations of her mother, Beatrix, who raises manners to a moral plane. That is, until Alma's hothouse crumbles, and she, as fiercely cultivated as one of her father's rare specimens, must face that she is relatively ignorant of the outside world, and of those closest to her in her own.

It's difficult to describe the breadth of the The Signature of All Things. Gilbert covers how to smuggle plant clippings to foreign buyers; the vulgarities of professional sailors; Cicero; Captain Cook's being hacked to death; varietals of vanilla pods; a sky-high waterspout; abolition and poverty; Euclidean gardening; sodomy and self-pleasuring; what the Dutch serve at tea-time; and what a rugby-like, women's-only Tahitian sport can tell us about the animal kingdom. (To name just a few.)

This, to say nothing of side stories, diversions and revelations that bring both the reader and Alma to their knees. But it is revelatory, not overwhelming. When Alma's ship to Tahiti trails through a "diamond field" of phosphorescence, it leaves an illuminated path in its wake, and Gilbert's shifts in landscape, the mysteries of her story, are no less beautiful and arresting.

Gilbert marries the technical, cultural and spiritual with a warm, frankly funny wit that adds richness to all three, her central character's evolution going lockstep with her actual discovery of evolution.

This kind of storytelling is rare — one in which an author can depict the particulars of a moss colony as skillfully as she maps the landscape of the human heart.
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Jun 09, 2015 Georgia Carvalho rated it liked it

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I enjoyed 95% of the book and Alma's story, however, some of the details took a weird turn, in my opinion, and rather detracted from the overall result. I very much enjoyed the period setting and the author's careful work in talking about the transition of science from dilettantism to serious occupation, her portrayal of the leap in human knowledge during the 19th Century is spot on. I also enjoyed her description of Alma's rational mind and love of learning, I had a difficult time understanding ...more

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Nov 03, 2013 Marcia rated it really liked it

A quirky but engrossing book about a singular, weird woman and her life in the early 19th century, whose ultimate obsession is moss. The story begins with her father's history in the late 18th century, but what stuck with me was the story of the daughter, whose solitary existence led to her study of these mostly ignored plants through her entire adult life. It is engrossing, well-written and immensely entertaining. I also learned quite a bit about moss and history in the process of reading this ...more

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Oct 30, 2013 Keith marked it as to-read

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Nov 03, 2013 Cherylcali "turn the page" rated it liked it

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Nov 13, 2013 Katie rated it really liked it

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Nov 17, 2013 Laura marked it as to-read

Shelves: bricks, pulitzerandrunnersupandmore, friend-love, lib-has-audio, hf, download-library, love-stories, library

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Nov 30, 2013 Heather marked it as to-read

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Dec 03, 2013 Kathy rated it liked it

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Dec 23, 2013 Helen (read247_instyle_inca) rated it really liked it

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Apr 11, 2014 Meghan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: book-club, women-travelers, fab-fiction-by-women, traveling, historical-fiction, europe, language, great-characters, science, love-story-and-romance

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