Backyard Giants
The Passionate, Heartbreaking, and Glorious Quest to Grow the Biggest Pumpkin Ever
Warren, Susan
Hardcover
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BOOK SUMMARY
In the tradition of Word Freak and Confederates in the Attic, a charming, witty account of a season in mad pursuit of the worlds largest pumpkin.
Every year, the race to grow the biggest pumpkin in the world draws a rowdy crowd of obsessive gardeners t
BOOK SYNOPSIS
In the tradition of Word Freak and Confederates in the Attic, a charming, witty account of a season in mad pursuit of the worlds largest pumpkin.
Every year, the race to grow the biggest pumpkin in the world draws a rowdy crowd of obsessive gardeners to county fairs and weigh-offs across the country. The competition is furious; theres sabotage and treachery and the heartbreak of root rot, and many a weigh-off ends in tears. This year more than just the grand prize is at stake. The Holy Grail is within reach: the worlds first fifteen-hundred pound pumpkin. And Ron and Dick Wallace will stop at nothing to get it.
Backyard Giants follows a tumultuous season in the life of a close-knit tribe of competitors as they chase down the ultimate pumpkin prize. In the grueling and gut-wrenching quest for truly colossal fruit, vacations are postponed, marriages are strained, and savings accounts are emptied. Backyards are converted into leafy laboratories of biogenetics and toxic chemicalsto say nothing of pumpkin sex. Riding shotgun with Ron and his father Dick, Wall Street Journal editor Susan Warren brings to life a winning and unforgettable crew of pumpkin lunatics: the newbie who shocked everyone by growing the big one last year; the pro-bono slime scientist; the groundhog assassin; and the safety trainer who risked electrocuting himself to save his patch. Funny, sharp, and engaging, Backyard Giants is a romp through a charming corner of American life, as quirky and enchanting as the big pumpkins themselves.
BOOK REVIEWS
Praise for Backyard Giants: "Strangely engrossing...Warren masterfully limns the subculture and the personalities of the fanatical growers, and the degree of peril is so high it is impossible not to get swept up in the suspenseful course of the season...Quirky and surprisingly affecting good fun--Ira Glass must be jealous." - Kirkus "In a world of biggests, highests, fastests, and farthestsof human obsessions that stretch the imaginationit should come as no surprise that there are people who devote the better part of their lives to growing pumpkins as big as elephants. But while size certainly matters, Susan Warren's expertly reported, charmingly told tale is about much more than the hidden subculture of enormous fruit. Backyard Giants is about the inexplicable drives and complex emotions that make the world such a wondrous place.'--Stefan Fatsis, author of Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players
"Of all the whack-brained things people do in their back yards - the compulsive cultivation of grass, the feeding of carnivorous bears, and let us never forget lawn darts - this is one of the most thoroughly whack-brained. In hog-wallows of manure, fertilizer and pesticide, pumpkins the size of old sofas are coaxed and coddled like race horses. Grown men (and a few women) hover over their patches, guarding the virginity of flowers with Ziploc bags, pruning vines with surgical angst, and arranging fans or woolen blankets on the swollen squash as the weather dictates. They lie awake in their beds listening for vandals and the sounds of growth-gone-mad as the gourds engorge themselves by 40, 50, 60 pounds in a night. A hairline split in the squash's stretching skin is all that's required to redirect a season's worth of toil to the compost pile. Those who shelter their pumpkins from overgrowth, bugs, woodchucks, fungus, hail, frost, sun, and all other natural phenomena, aim for world-record territory, currently a few hundred pounds shy of a Toyota Tercel or roughly equivalent to a holstein. Backyard Giants is a portrait of obsession, disturbing and wondrous."--Hannah Holmes, author of Suburban Safari: A Year on the Lawn
Submit a book reviewFOR RELATED BOOKS
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MORE BOOK INFO
ISBN: 1596912782
ISBN(13-digit): 9781596912786
Dewey Decimal: 635/.62
Library of Congress: bl2007020405
Book Publisher: St Martins Pr
Language: ENG
No. of Pages: 245
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