Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5.0 out of 5 stars
This is why I get the unmanly foods at the Tesco, 3 Jun 2007
" ... you grow things, and the deer, groundhogs, beetles, and webworms eat them, and you eat what's left." - Wm. Alexander
"A hundred pounds of apples is a lot of pandowdy." - Wm. Alexander
For me, mind you, pizza is the perfect food. Especially cold for breakfast with a glass of milk. My wife, on the other hand, nags me to get my fifty daily servings of fruit and veg. Ok, ok, some shreds of onion and mushroom wouldn't spoil the Meat Lover's Deep Dish Feast, but I wouldn't dedicate ten years of my life to growing stuff like author William Alexander unless pizza grew on a vine.
THE $64 TOMATO is Alexander's fun tale of the fifth decade of his life, which he spends battling deer, beetles, webworms, squirrels, groundhogs, weeds, caterpillars, opossums, and fungus to bring the produce of his home garden in the Hudson River Valley into the kitchen to feed the family. It's a love/hate relationship that sometimes interferes with his day job as the director of technology at a psychiatric research institute.
Three elements of THE $64 TOMATO elevate the narrative well above the ordinary. One is William's engaging self-deprecatory humor. He's not afraid to reveal himself as an occasional idiot, as when he contemplated managing his meadow with fire, an action plan narrowly avoided only after noticing that the National Parks Service caused the evacuation of Los Alamos Laboratory after losing control of a "controlled burn" in New Mexico's Bandelier National Monument. The second is the self-realization of the limits imposed by aging and a herniated spinal disc as he reaches 50:
"I felt a little dizzy. I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. I wanted to have an affair. I wanted to be young again."
Just turned 58 myself, I can relate.
The third is the esoteric knowledge gained while laboring at his hobby and imparted to the reader, the best example being the chapter on growing apples, "No Such Thing as Organic Apples". Did you know that apple blossoms need to be cross-pollinated by a different apple variety in order to set fruit?
Perhaps the book's greatest failing is that no pictures are included. However, this deficit is easily remedied by going to the Web site address comprised of this volume's title followed by ".com". I tell you, even I was impressed - but not so much that my fruit and veg is coming from anywhere other than the supermarket.
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