The Nesting Place


Book Description

Create the home--and life--you've always wanted with the help of popular blogger and author of Cozy Minimalist Home Myquillyn Smith (The Nester) as she helps you free yourself to take risks and find beauty in imperfection. Myquillyn Smith is all about embracing reality--especially when it comes to decorating a home bursting with kids, pets, and all the unpredictable messes of life. In The Nesting Place, Myquillyn shares the secrets of decorating for real people--and it has nothing to do with creating a flawless look to wow your guests and everything to do with making peace with the natural imperfection and joy of daily living. Drawing on her years of experience creating beauty in her 13 different homes and countless seasons of life, Myquillyn will show you how to think differently about the true purpose of your home, and simply and creatively tailor it to reflect you and your unique style--without breaking the bank. Full of simple steps, practical advice, and beautiful, full-color photos, The Nesting Place gives you the tools you need to: Cultivate a home that works for you and your family Transform your home into a place that's inviting and warm for family and friends Discover your own personal style There is beauty in embracing the lived-in, loved-on, and just-about-used-up aspects of our homes and our daily lives--let Myquillyn show you how. Praise for The Nesting Place: "This book made me look at every room in my house differently, with a new lens of creativity and beauty and possibility. It inspired me to reclaim my home as sacred space, ripe with opportunities to celebrate and create memories and moments." --Shauna Niequist, New York Times bestselling author of Present Over Perfect and I Guess I Haven't Learned That Yet "This highly personal account about embracing imperfection and finding contentment in your home is like sitting down with a good friend and talking about the stuff that really matters. The Nesting Place is full of approachable ideas, encouragement, and a whole lot of heart." --Sherry Petersik, home blogger; bestselling author of Young House Love




A Great Place to Work For All


Book Description

Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Foreword A Better View of Motivation -- Introduction A Great Place to Work For All -- PART ONE Better for Business -- Chapter 1 More Revenue, More Profit -- Chapter 2 A New Business Frontier -- Chapter 3 How to Succeed in the New Business Frontier -- Chapter 4 Maximizing Human Potential Accelerates Performance -- PART TWO Better for People, Better for the World -- Chapter 5 When the Workplace Works For Everyone -- Chapter 6 Better Business for a Better World -- PART THREE The For All Leadership Call -- Chapter 7 Leading to a Great Place to Work For All -- Chapter 8 The For All Rocket Ship -- Notes -- Thanks -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Z -- About Us -- Authors




A Green Place to Be: The Creation of Central Park


Book Description

How did Central Park become a vibrant gem in the heart of New York City? Follow the visionaries behind the plan as it springs to green life. In 1858, New York City was growing so fast that new roads and tall buildings threatened to swallow up the remaining open space. The people needed a green place to be — a park with ponds to row on and paths for wandering through trees and over bridges. When a citywide contest solicited plans for creating a park out of barren swampland, Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted put their heads together to create the winning design, and the hard work of making their plans a reality began. By winter, the lake opened for skating. By the next summer, the waterside woodland known as the Ramble opened for all to enjoy. Meanwhile, sculptors, stone masons, and master gardeners joined in to construct thirty-four unique bridges, along with fountains, pagodas, and band shells, making New York's Central Park a green gift to everyone. Included in the end matter are bios of Vaux and Olmsted, a bibliography, and engaging factual snippets.




No Place To Go


Book Description

Adults don't talk about the business of doing our business. We work on one assumption: the world of public bathrooms is problem- and politics-free. No Place To Go: Answering the Call of Nature in the Urban Jungle reveals the opposite is true. No Place To Go is a toilet tour from London to San Francisco to Toronto and beyond. From pay potties to deserted alleyways, No Place To Go is a marriage of urbanism, social narrative, and pop culture that shows the ways — momentous and mockable — public bathrooms just don't work. Like, for the homeless, who, faced with no place to go sometimes literally take to the streets. (Ever heard of a municipal poop map?) For people with invisible disabilities, such as Crohn’s disease, who stay home rather than risk soiling themselves on public transit routes. For girls who quit sports teams because they don’t want to run to the edge of the pitch to pee. Celebrities like Lady Gaga and Bruce Springsteen have protested bathroom bills that will stomp on the rights of transpeople. And where was Hillary Clinton after she arrived back to the stage late after the first commercial break of the live-televised Democratic leadership debate in December 2015? Stuck in a queue for the women’s bathroom. Peel back the layers on public bathrooms and it’s clear many more people want for good access than have it. Public bathroom access is about cities, society, design, movement, and equity. The real question is: Why are public toilets so crappy?




Different--A Great Thing to Be!


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • This joyful rhyming book encourages children to value the “different” in all people, leading the way to a kinder world in which the differences in all of us are celebrated and embraced. Macy is a girl who’s a lot like you and me, but she's also quite different, which is a great thing to be. With kindness, grace, and bravery, Macy finds her place in the world, bringing beauty and laughter wherever she goes and leading others to find delight in the unique design of every person. Children are naturally aware of the differences they encounter at school, in their neighborhood, and in other everyday relationships. They just need to be given tools to understand and appreciate what makes us “different,” permission to ask questions about it, and eyes to see and celebrate it in themselves as well as in those around them.




This Is All I Got


Book Description

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • From an award-winning journalist, a poignant and gripping immersion in the life of a young, homeless single mother amid her quest to find stability and shelter in the richest city in America LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD • “Riveting . . . a remarkable feat of reporting.”—The New York Times Camila is twenty-two years old and a new mother. She has no family to rely on, no partner, and no home. Despite her intelligence and determination, the odds are firmly stacked against her. In this extraordinary work of literary reportage, Lauren Sandler chronicles a year in Camila’s life—from the birth of her son to his first birthday—as she navigates the labyrinth of poverty and homelessness in New York City. In her attempts to secure a safe place to raise her son and find a measure of freedom in her life, Camila copes with dashed dreams, failed relationships, the desolation of abandonment, and miles of red tape with grit, humor, and uncanny resilience. Every day, more than forty-five million Americans attempt to survive below the poverty line. Every night, nearly sixty thousand people sleep in New York City-run shelters, 40 percent of them children. In This Is All I Got, Sandler brings this deeply personal issue to life, vividly depicting one woman's hope and despair and her steadfast determination to change her life despite the myriad setbacks she encounters. This Is All I Got is a rare feat of reporting and a dramatic story of survival. Sandler’s candid and revealing account also exposes the murky boundaries between a journalist and her subject when it becomes impossible to remain a dispassionate observer. She has written a powerful and unforgettable indictment of a system that is often indifferent to the needs of those it serves, and that sometimes seems designed to fail. Praise for This Is All I Got “A rich, sociologically valuable work that’s more gripping, and more devastating, than fiction.”—Booklist “Vivid, heartbreaking. . . . Readers will be moved by this harrowing and impassioned call for change.”—Publishers Weekly “A closely observed chronicle . . . Sandler displays her journalistic talent by unerringly presenting this dire situation. . . . An impressive blend of dispassionate reporting, pungent condemnation of public welfare, and gritty humanity.” —Kirkus Reviews




What We Owe to Each Other


Book Description

How do we judge whether an action is morally right or wrong? If an action is wrong, what reason does that give us not to do it? Why should we give such reasons priority over our other concerns and values? In this book, T. M. Scanlon offers new answers to these questions, as they apply to the central part of morality that concerns what we owe to each other. According to his contractualist view, thinking about right and wrong is thinking about what we do in terms that could be justified to others and that they could not reasonably reject. He shows how the special authority of conclusions about right and wrong arises from the value of being related to others in this way, and he shows how familiar moral ideas such as fairness and responsibility can be understood through their role in this process of mutual justification and criticism. Scanlon bases his contractualism on a broader account of reasons, value, and individual well-being that challenges standard views about these crucial notions. He argues that desires do not provide us with reasons, that states of affairs are not the primary bearers of value, and that well-being is not as important for rational decision-making as it is commonly held to be. Scanlon is a pluralist about both moral and non-moral values. He argues that, taking this plurality of values into account, contractualism allows for most of the variability in moral requirements that relativists have claimed, while still accounting for the full force of our judgments of right and wrong.




PostSecret


Book Description

The project that captured a nation's imagination. The instructions were simple, but the results were extraordinary. "You are invited to anonymously contribute a secret to a group art project. Your secret can be a regret, fear, betrayal, desire, confession, or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything -- as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before. Be brief. Be legible. Be creative." It all began with an idea Frank Warren had for a community art project. He began handing out postcards to strangers and leaving them in public places -- asking people to write down a secret they had never told anyone and mail it to him, anonymously. The response was overwhelming. The secrets were both provocative and profound, and the cards themselves were works of art -- carefully and creatively constructed by hand. Addictively compelling, the cards reveal our deepest fears, desires, regrets, and obsessions. Frank calls them "graphic haiku," beautiful, elegant, and small in structure but powerfully emotional. As Frank began posting the cards on his website, PostSecret took on a life of its own, becoming much more than a simple art project. It has grown into a global phenomenon, exposing our individual aspirations, fantasies, and frailties -- our common humanity. Every day dozens of postcards still make their way to Frank, with postmarks from around the world, touching on every aspect of human experience. This extraordinary collection brings together the most powerful, personal, and beautifully intimate secrets Frank Warren has received -- and brilliantly illuminates that human emotions can be unique and universal at the same time.




Troublemakers


Book Description

A radical educator's paradigm-shifting inquiry into the accepted, normal demands of school, as illuminated by moving portraits of four young "problem children" In this dazzling debut, Carla Shalaby, a former elementary school teacher, explores the everyday lives of four young "troublemakers," challenging the ways we identify and understand so-called problem children. Time and again, we make seemingly endless efforts to moderate, punish, and even medicate our children, when we should instead be concerned with transforming the very nature of our institutions, systems, and structures, large and small. Through delicately crafted portraits of these memorable children—Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus—Troublemakers allows us to see school through the eyes of those who know firsthand what it means to be labeled a problem. From Zora's proud individuality to Marcus's open willfulness, from Sean's struggle with authority to Lucas's tenacious imagination, comes profound insight—for educators and parents alike—into how schools engender, exclude, and then try to erase trouble, right along with the young people accused of making it. And although the harsh disciplining of adolescent behavior has been called out as part of a school-to-prison pipeline, the children we meet in these pages demonstrate how a child's path to excessive punishment and exclusion in fact begins at a much younger age. Shalaby's empathetic, discerning, and elegant prose gives us a deeply textured look at what noncompliance signals about the environments we require students to adapt to in our schools. Both urgent and timely, this paradigm-shifting book challenges our typical expectations for young children and with principled affection reveals how these demands—despite good intentions—work to undermine the pursuit of a free and just society.




A Place You'll Never Be


Book Description

Six Days. Five Inmates. One Guard. Traversing the vast, serene wilderness in Northern Saskatchewan, a group of prisoners sets out on a six day canoe trip. Quinn, an inmate trustee, has been recruited for the pilot project meant to physically and emotionally challenge a small set of inmates about to be released after long terms inside for violent crimes. Their leader, Leggett, only thinks he’s in charge. Inviting along a new parole officer, Martha, and her teenage son, Brian, is just the first of his mistakes. An insect plague of biblical proportions has taken over the north country, and the inmates have always had a secret plan. The river quickly becomes a place of reckoning. Except for Quinn, the prisoners reject any hope for rehabilitation. By the end of day six, the men find themselves grappling with violence, mutiny, and a plot to harvest and sell drugs down the river, all of which echoes off the incessant buzzing that surrounds them as millions of mysterious insects follow along in the forest, destroying anything they come across – plants, animals, even humans... A Place You'll Never Be is a story of external action and internal redemption. The injured Quinn is forced to evolve, facing his past, and along with Martha and Brian, they all must find the strength to survive as they race to the end of the river.