A House with No Roof


Book Description

In 1966, Rebecca Wilson's father, a Union Leader and civil rights activist, was assassinated on the street in San Francisco. Rebecca—known throughout as "Becky"—was three years old. A House with No Roof is Wilson's gripping memoir of how the murder of her father propelled her family into a life–long search for solace and understanding. Following her father's death, Becky's mother, Barbara, desperate for closure and peace, uproots the family and moves to Bolinas, California. In this small, coastal town of hippies, artists, and "burnouts," the family continues to unravel. To cope, Barbara turns to art and hangs a banner that loudly declares, "Wilsons are Bold." But she still succumbs to her grief, neglecting her children in her wake. Becky's brother turns to drugs while her beautiful sister chooses a life on the road and becomes pregnant. As Becky fumbles and hurtles toward adulthood herself, she comes to learn the full truth of her father's death—a truth that threatens to steal her sanity and break her spirit. Told with humor and candor—and with love and family devotion at its heart—A House with No Roof is a brave account of one daughter's struggle to survive.




A Home With No Roof


Book Description

A Home With No Roof is the author's second book in his Scott Mathias Detective series. This mystery/thriller is set on the island of Bermuda, where the NH native, Wayne W. Whicher, has travelled to often. Whicher loves to transport his readers to the picture-perfect island where he has enjoyed many long "research" vacations. Scott Mathias is working three cases at once on the otherwise tranquil island. A variety of girls have been abducted from cruise ships docked at port. A pimp-like killer is harrassing the island's homeless people, and a new friend of Scott's has now gone missing. She loved her Italian food, much to her own demise. Follow Scott from end to end of picturesque Bermuda as he attempts to solve the myraid of cases that he is working on. One, two, buckle my shoe. Three, four, out the door. The first person, disturbed, psychotic killer rhymes to himself. Because it makes him smile. When taking out the trash and disposing of his victims, this main character of the book mutters. "Four rocks, not three or even five, but four rocks. Four is a perfect number." I suppose that he's pretty well convinced that four rocks will do the trick to weigh down the body that he floats out into the ocean inside a plastic bag. The trash. It sinks down into the teal, crystal clear waters and disappears beneath the surface. If you enjoy "A Home With No Roof," go back to the beginning of it all with Detective Mathias in the first novel of the series, "Sunset over the Hermes."




Young House Love


Book Description

This New York Times bestselling book is filled with hundreds of fun, deceptively simple, budget-friendly ideas for sprucing up your home. With two home renovations under their (tool) belts and millions of hits per month on their blog YoungHouseLove.com, Sherry and John Petersik are home-improvement enthusiasts primed to pass on a slew of projects, tricks, and techniques to do-it-yourselfers of all levels. Packed with 243 tips and ideas—both classic and unexpected—and more than 400 photographs and illustrations, this is a book that readers will return to again and again for the creative projects and easy-to-follow instructions in the relatable voice the Petersiks are known for. Learn to trick out a thrift-store mirror, spice up plain old roller shades, "hack" your Ikea table to create three distinct looks, and so much more.




Home Is a Roof Over a Pig


Book Description

“[A] down-to-earth memoir chronicling her family’s stint in the Chinese province of Shandong on the eve of the Beijing Olympics” (Publishers Weekly). When Aminta Arrington moves with her husband and three young children (including a daughter adopted from China) from suburban Georgia to Tai’an, a city where donkeys share the road with cars, the family is bewildered by seemingly endless cultural differences large and small. But with the help of new friends, they soon find their way. Full of humor and unexpectedly moving moments, Home Is a Roof Over a Pig recounts a transformative quest with a freshness that will delight. “A brutally honest and fascinating peek at life for an American family living in a foreign country. I was engrossed in the story as Arrington used her humor, and ultimately understanding and flexibility to survive, realize, and eventually love the contradictory land of China.” —Kay Bratt, bestselling author of Silent Tears: A Journey of Hope in a Chinese Orphanage “The power of Aminta Arrington’s Home Is a Roof Over a Pig is you can see both sides of the ‘China coin’ from it—something most people won’t get just by traveling through, or only by hearing about China in Western languages. Read it, it will help you dip into the real China.” —Xinran, author of The Good Women of China “A military wife turned ESL instructor’s sharp-eyed account of how the adoption of a Chinese baby girl led to her family’s life-changing decision to live and work in rural China . . . Candid and heartfelt.” —Kirkus Reviews




No Fixed Address


Book Description

For fans of Wendelin van Draanen and Cynthia Lord, a touching and funny middle-grade story about family, friendship, and growing up when you're one step away from homelessness. Twelve-and-three-quarter-year-old Felix Knutsson has a knack for trivia. His favorite game show is Who What Where When; he even named his gerbil after the host. Felix's mom, Astrid, is loving but can't seem to hold on to a job. So when they get evicted from their latest shabby apartment, they have to move into a van. Astrid swears him to secrecy; he can't tell anyone about their living arrangement, not even Dylan and Winnie, his best friends at his new school. If he does, she warns him, he'll be taken away from her and put in foster care. As their circumstances go from bad to worse, Felix gets a chance to audition for a junior edition of Who What Where When, and he's determined to earn a spot on the show. Winning the cash prize could make everything okay again. But things don't turn out the way he expects. . . . Susin Nielsen deftly combines humor, heartbreak, and hope in this moving story about people who slip through the cracks in society, and about the power of friendship and community to make all the difference.




Under One Roof


Book Description

Sometimes people aren't who you think they are. Everyone knew what was going on in Ballard, Washington: developers were building a giant shopping mall, but a house belonging to a feisty octogenarian named Edith Wilson Macefield was in the way. They offered her a million dollars. She told them to take a hike. Everyone knew that Barry Martin, head of the construction project, was involved in the push to get her out of the house so that the project could proceed without further delay. Everyone was wrong. When Barry took the job as construction supervisor for the shopping mall that was being erected around Edith's little house, he determined to make things as easy for her as he could. He didn't expect that she'd ask him to drive her to a hair appointment—but he did offer to help, after all. And it was in that one small gesture that an unlikely friendship was sparked, one that changed them both forever. The story of Barry Martin and Edith Macefield is a tale of balance and compassion, of giving enough without giving too much, of helping our elderly loved ones through the tough times without taking away their dignity. In the end, Under One Roof is a tale of grace, and one from which all of us can take solace and strength. From Barry and Edith we have much to learn about love and letting go and, just possibly, about seeing through fading light to find great joy.




The House with the Mansard Roof


Book Description

Mixing personal memory and cultural history, Brennan's poems chronicle the joys, sorrows, and astonishments of a now-vanished 20th-century America.




Under Every Roof


Book Description

This book is a delightful guide to understanding and identifying architectural styles for kids and their parents Why do houses look the way they do? Why do dome have small windows, while others seem to be all glass? Why do some hug the landscape, while others are tall with very steep roofs? Why do dome people live in mansions, while others live in mobile houses? Can you imagine a house that looks like an elephant or a shoe? Children and adults will learn about the history of domestic architecture, the styles of the houses we live in, and the terms for the architectural elements that compose the buildings. Use the pictorial field guide to investigate your own house, then take it along on family outings to identify different architectural details. Under Every Roof features more than 60 houses from 30 states and the District of Columbia that are listed in the National Register of Historic Places; many of these are house museums that are open to the public. Kids need to understand the house they live in, so the book also includes a wide variety of regional styles and architectural types. The full-color, watercolor illustrations add a unique, gentle humor to the text.




A Roof Cutter's Secrets


Book Description




Four Walls and a Roof


Book Description

A Financial Times Best Book of the Year A Guardian Best Architecture Book of the Year “Sharp, revealing, funny.” —The Guardian “An original and even occasionally hilarious book about losing ideals and finding them again... [De Graaf] deftly shows that architecture cannot be better or more pure than the flawed humans who make it.” —The Economist Architecture, we like to believe, is an elevated art form that shapes the world as it pleases. Four Walls and a Roof turns this fiction on its head, offering a candid account of what it’s really like to work as an architect. Drawing on his own tragicomic experiences in the field, Reinier de Graaf reveals the world of contemporary architecture in vivid snapshots: from the corridors of wealth in London, Moscow, and Dubai to the demolished hopes of postwar social housing in New York and St. Louis. We meet ambitious oligarchs, developers for whom architecture is nothing more than an investment, and layers of bureaucrats, consultants, and mysterious hangers-on who lie between any architect’s idea and the chance of its execution. “This is a book about power, money and influence, and architecture’s complete lack of any of them... Witty, insightful and funny, it is a (sometimes painful) dissection of a profession that thinks it is still in control.” —Financial Times “This is the most stimulating book on architecture and its practice that I have read for years.” —Architects’ Journal