A Place in Life


Book Description

Six year old Joe being forced to grow up quickly after learning that his father won't be returning home from the Korean War. On the same day, his mother is struck and killed by a speeding car. Forced to endure the sterility of New York's child protective institutions, he is finally pulled cross-country and finds himself fighting to overcome the old world bigotry of the immigrant family who adopts him. So begins Joe's journey from childhood, through Vietnam, his love for his wife, the commonplace and unusual hardships, and the complex relationship between himself and his son.




Genius of Place


Book Description

This definitive, first full-scale biography of Olmsted--famed designer of New York's Central Park--reveals him also as a brilliant political and social reformer.




I Hate This Place


Book Description

From the Grammy-nominated star of Saturday Night Live and his equally talented sister comes a delightfully cynical look at life through a half-full glass. I HATE THIS PLACE is the book for anyone who’s ever tired of crossing to the sunny side of the street, looking for that elusive pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, or reading self-help books that are meant to bring peace and prosperity. Guaranteed to shatter illusions, extinguish all hope, and keep the jaded and the disgruntled laughing all the way, it is filled with such daily “affirmations” as “If you don’t have anything nice to say, welcome to the club,” and advice like “Knock, and the door shall be slammed in your face.” Rife with the wit and wisdom of Jimmy Fallon and his sister Gloria, this book promises to tickle the funny bone of the pessimist in everyone.




Puzzles of Amish Life


Book Description

Revised edition! People's Place Book #10. A sociologist provides a way to understand the Amish people's intentional way of living in a world far different from their own. Fun to read. How do the Amish thrive in the midst of modern life? Why do the Amish separate themselves from the modern world? Why do a religious people spurn religious symbols and church buildings? Why is humility a cherished value? Why do a gentle people shun disobedient members? How do the Amish regulate social change? Why is ownership of cars objectionable, but not their use? Why are some modes of transportation acceptable and other forbidden? Why are tractors permitted around barns but not in fields? Why are horses used to pull modern farm machinery? Why are telephones banned from Amish homes? Why are some forms of electricity acceptable while others are rejected? How is modern machinery operated without electricity? Why are some occupations acceptable and others taboo? Why do the Amish use the services of professionals -- lawyers, doctors, and dentists -- but oppose higher education? Why do Amish youth rebel in their teenage years? Are the Amish freeloading on American life? Are the Amish behind or ahead of the modern world?




A Place for Everything


Book Description

There's something about a closet door that stimulates curiosity. Who among us doesn't want to take a peek behind it, especially when it's in the home of a friend who has a real eye for design and who also possesses the keys to being organized? Peri Wolfman and Charles Gold have those very friends, and they persuaded them to open their doors and share the secrets of stylish storage. Their aim was to provide original and creative solutions for the problem of keeping up with all the things that accumulate in our lives. What they found was that you don't need to build new storage (though there is a plan for an "everything closet" to cover all needs). Once you start arranging by shape or color or you invest in some great old cabinets or baskets, what was once clutter can become a collection. Vintage or new pegs and hooks are great to look at and can hold it all, from necklaces in the bedroom to coats and hats in the mudroom. Old benches can be stacked as bookshelves. Runners can be installed on the bottom of kitchen shelves, doubling your storage space for stemware. Drawers can be retrofitted with special slots for your silver, or you can amass a collection of pressed glass and use it to display your cutlery. A Place for Everything is filled with stylish and sensible advice for clutter control in kitchens and dining rooms, living rooms and dens, bedrooms, baths, sheds, and basements. And tucked between the chapters are special sections with ideas for coping with photographs and collections, paper and pencils, and countless other little items. What's more, A Place for Everything gives you a chance to peek behind all those closed doors.




A Place for Truth


Book Description

Since its founding at Harvard in 1992, The Veritas Forum has provided a place for the university world to explore the deepest questions of truth and life. Now gathered in one volume are some of The Veritas Forum's most notable presentations, with contributions from Francis Collins, Tim Keller, N. T. Wright, Mary Poplin and more. Volume editor Dallas Willard introduces each presentation, highlighting its significance and putting it in context for us today.




My Place At The Table


Book Description

In this debut memoir, a James Beard Award–winning writer, whose childhood idea of fine dining was Howard Johnson’s, tells how he became one of Paris’s most influential food critics Until Alec Lobrano landed a job in the glamorous Paris office of Women’s Wear Daily, his main experience of French cuisine was the occasional supermarket éclair. An interview with the owner of a renowned cheese shop for his first article nearly proves a disaster because he speaks no French. As he goes on to cover celebrities and couturiers and improves his mastery of the language, he gradually learns what it means to be truly French. He attends a cocktail party with Yves St. Laurent and has dinner with Giorgio Armani. Over a superb lunch, it’s his landlady who ultimately provides him with a lasting touchstone for how to judge food: “you must understand the intentions of the cook.” At the city’s brasseries and bistros, he discovers real French cooking. Through a series of vivid encounters with culinary figures from Paul Bocuse to Julia Child to Ruth Reichl, Lobrano hones his palate and finds his voice. Soon the timid boy from Connecticut is at the epicenter of the Parisian dining revolution and the restaurant critic of one of the largest newspapers in the France. A mouthwatering testament to the healing power of food, My Place at the Table is a moving coming-of-age story of how a gay man emerges from a wounding childhood, discovers himself, and finds love. Published here for the first time is Lobrano’s “little black book,” an insider’s guide to his thirty all-time-favorite Paris restaurants.




This Place, These People


Book Description

The numbers of farms and farmers on the Great Plains are dwindling. Disappearing even faster are the farm places—the houses, barns, and outbuildings that made the rural landscape a place of habitation. Nancy Warner's photographs tell the stories of buildings that were once loved yet have now been abandoned. Her evocative images are juxtaposed with the voices of Nebraska farm people, lovingly recorded by sociologist David Stark. These plainspoken recollections tell of a way of life that continues to evolve in the face of wrenching change. Warner's spare, formal photographs invite readers to listen to the cadences and tough-minded humor of everyday speech in the Great Plains. Stark's afterword grounds the project in the historical relationship between people and their land. In the tradition of Wright Morris, this combination of words and images is both art and document, evoking memories, emotions, and questions for anyone with rural American roots.




Sense of Place, Health and Quality of Life


Book Description

A significant body of theoretical and empirical studies describes 'sense of place' as an outcome of interconnected psychological, social and environmental processes in relation to physical place(s). Sense of place has been examined, particularly in human geography, in terms of both the character intrinsic to a place as a localized, bounded and material entity, and the sentiments of attachment/detachment that humans experience and express in relation to specific places. Scholars in a wide range of disciplines are increasingly exploring the relationship between place and health, and recently, the field of public health has been encouraged to recognize sense of place as a potential contributing factor to well-being. It is evident that over the last few decades, sense of place has developed into a versatile construct. This important book brings together work related to sense of place and health, broadly defined, from the perspective of a variety of fields and disciplines. It will give the reader an understanding of both the range of applications of this construct within approaches to human health as well as the breadth of research methodologies employed in its investigation.




Hotel Life


Book Description

What is a hotel? As Caroline Field Levander and Matthew Pratt Guterl show us in this thought-provoking book, even though hotels are everywhere around us, we rarely consider their essential role in our modern existence and how they help frame our sense of who and what we are. They are, in fact, as centrally important as other powerful places like prisons, hospitals, or universities. More than simply structures made of steel, concrete, and glass, hotels are social and political institutions that we invest with overlapping and contradictory meaning. These alluring places uniquely capture the realities of our world, where the lines between public and private, labor and leisure, fortune and failure, desire and despair are regularly blurred. Guiding readers through the story of hotels as places of troublesome possibility, as mazelike physical buildings, as inspirational touchstones for art and literature, and as unsettling, even disturbing, backdrops for the drama of everyday life, Levander and Guterl ensure that we will never think about this seemingly ordinary place in the same way again.