Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition - Softcover

Robert Pogue Harrison is the Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature and chairs the Department of French and Italian at Stanford University. He is the author of "The Body of Beatrice", "Forests: The Shadow of Civilization", "The Dominion of the Dead", "Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition", and "Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age", the latter three published by the University of Chicago Press. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also host of the radio program "Entitled Opinions" on Stanford's station KZSU 90.1.

“The year’s most thought-provoking, original, and weighty garden book is Gardens. . . . Reading Harrison’s book is like strolling down a path through a well-cultivated, richly sown, light-dappled woodland. . . . Just as in the making of a garden, there’s no end to the wonder; the journey is everything.”

(New York Times Book Review)

"The rabbis of the Talmud counseled you that if you are planting a tree and someone tells you that the Messiah has come, you should finish planting your tree and then go out to investigate. Robert Pogue Harrison implies something similar in his rich and beguiling Gardens. Gardens, though they offer peace and repose, are islands of care, he writes, not a refuge from it. That is why they are important, since care is what makes us human. . . . In many ways Gardens is a personal essay as much as it is a work of scholarship. Mr. Harrison has planted his own garden of beautiful quotations and provocative speculation, and it is an absorbing and stimulating place to spend time." (Jonathan Rosen Wall Street Journal)

“In this book’s two great predecessors, Forests and The Dominion of the Dead, Robert Pogue Harrison took two preoccupying images of the human psyche and considered them with a depth and originality that revealed their unlimited and unbroken presence in every assumption and moment of our lives. Gardens he describes modestly as an essay, but it has, or at least suggests, the same kind of pervasive presence of an underlying human impulse in our relation to the world around us. He does it with eloquence, grace, and erudition rooted in the literatures of his four native languages (including Turkish) that informed his earlier books. The range of his perspective on the human myth suggests that he may be our Bachelard.” (W. S. Merwin)

"Gardening, to me, is foreign soil. . . . And yet I find myself completely besotted by a new book titlted Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison. The author . . . is one of the very best cultural critics at work today. he is a man of deep learning, immense generosity of spirit, passionate curiosity and manifold rhetorical gifts. . . . As I read this exraordinary, luminous book, I found myself envying my green-thumbed buddies and their serenity-inducing, life-affirming ritual—earthworms and all." (Julia Keller Chicago Tribune)

"This book is about gardens as a metaphor for the human condition. It is not about the history of designed gardens or of gardening as a practice. Harrison draws freely and with brilliance from 5,000 years of Western literature and criticism, including works on philosophy and garden history. . . . Harrison is a careful as well as an inspiring scholar." (Tom Turner Times Higher Education)

"Harrison is a cultural historian alive to the poetry of science as well as insights poetry offers to the natural history of humankind. In Gardens, he explores the meanings of gardening, from the lofty height of Homer and the Bible to the poignant plots tended by homeless people in New York. Our fascination with gardens endures, even as the gardens themselves come and go with the seasons. They're not meant to last, Harrison reminds us; it's their job to 'reenchant the present.'" (Matthew Battles New Hampshire Public Radio)

"Harrison's engaging, verdant prose invites reads in, much like flowers and fountains encourage visitors to linger in resplendent gardens, and the extensive bibliography encourages reads to continue their education." (Choice)

"I'm not sure that I'd sell my shirt for any living critic. But if there had to be one, it would unquestionably be Robert Pogue Harrison, whose study of Forests . . . has the true quality of literature, not criticism--it stays with you, like an amiable ghost, long after you have read it. Though more modest in scope, this new book [Gardens], is similarly destined to become a classic." (Jonathan Bate Spectator)

"The Year's Best Nonfiction" (Matthew Battles Barnes and Noble Review)