The Garden of Invention by Jane S. Smith/Chicago Tribune Review

With the exception of F. Scott Fitzgerald novels, I rarely read outside the realm of biography and history until I was in my late twenties. I wanted to know as much as I could back then; I thought all education was based on the facts. And so I read about the history of science and the history of technology. I read the life of Tolstoy and not his stories.

When Elizabeth Taylor recently asked me to review Jane S. Smith's new Luther Burbank biography, The Garden of Invention, for the Chicago Tribune, I was taken back to a former self—taken back quite willingly. I loved this story about this seed and plant man, this grafter, hybridizer, cross-fertilizer. I turned off the phones and read it all on a single, stolen Monday.

A few paragraphs from the review are here:

He was a genius, by the estimation of many, "an evoluter of new plants," by his own. He changed the shape of potatoes and married an apricot and plum. He gave rise to the Shasta daisy and the Royal walnut, gave tours of his Santa Rosa, Calif., gardens to no less than Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Helen Keller and Jack London, and because he was one of the very busiest men on Earth -- others said so, he concurred -- he began, in 1907, to charge a fee to those ordinary citizens who hoped to stand, for a moment, in his considerable shadow....

All in all, this Burbank makes for a tremendous character, and with "The Garden of Invention," Smith, who teaches at Northwestern University and previously authored "Patenting the Sun," has yielded a first-class portrait -- witty, seamless and unflaggingly informed. I couldn't find a single useless tangent to critique, didn't stumble across the arcane, didn't wish for light, for there was always light in this book that brings Burbank to pulsing life even as it teaches plant science, patent law, eugenics, evolution and the fate of the prickly pear.

It's all here in "The Garden of Invention" -- not too much and never slight -- and I was, from its first sentence to last, a most grateful reader. I was wishing, as I turned the book's final pages, that I could go enroll in a Jane S. Smith class, sit back and learn whatever she is now teaching.