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

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

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Around the World in 80 Books