Waking Up in Eden

Waking Up in Eden
by Lucinda Fleeson

310 pages
Algonquin Books, 2009
List price: $13.95




Give Ms. Fleeson credit.  She took a chance on life, leaving her job as a newspaper journalist in Philadelphia, for a position in Hawaii, helping to transform botanic gardens on the "garden island" of Kauai into the gems they were meant to be.  Offered the job by her friend and colleague Bill Klein, her venture into the world of fast-disappearing native flora changed her life.

I found her account of her work there to be fascinating in a botanical sort of way and I was left with greater knowledge of the fragility of native ecosystems.  Fleeson is a good writer, as one might expect, but it wasn't the most engaging read I've had in recent months.  As my three-star rating says, it's worth a look, but not likely one you'd require for your permanent library.

Lucinda Fleeson is director of the Hubert Humphrey Fellowship Program at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. A reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer for many years, she has received an Arthur Rouse Award for Press Criticism, a McGee Journalism Fellowship in Southern Africa, a Knight International Press Fellowship, and a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard.  Before settling in Washington, D.C., she lived in Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Budapest, Botswana, and most notably, Kauai.

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The publication being reviewed in this blog post was the sole compensation for reviewing the product. All opinions expressed here are mine. If I like it, I'll say so. If I don't, I'll say that, too.