A View from the Roof


Book Description

A university professor. A restaurateur. A Hollywood leading man. The Mackie Men of New Orleans have made success a family tradition. In A View from the Roof, Presidential Award-winning speaker Dr. Calvin Mackie reveals just how they did it. Through a slideshow of poignant stories involving the Mackie brothers' tough-as-nails roofer dad Willie, readers will learn the hands-on, humorous lessons that propelled Calvin and his brothers to the top of their professions. From the hot gable rooftops of New Orleans to the set of a Spike Lee film, this book will leave readers with a view they'll always remember.




Roof Octopus


Book Description

Read Along or Enhanced eBook: When Nora hears a soft "tap, tap, tap" at her bedroom window she never expects it to be the tentacle of a very large octopus, but that's exactly what it is--an octopus on her apartment building. The octopus turns out to be a very neighborly sort of octopus, helping the residents to wash their cars or weed the window boxes, and Nora makes fast friends with him. But one morning, the octopus is nowhere in sight. Has he moved on already? And just when Nora wanted to bring him for Show and Tell!




My Mother's Luck


Book Description




On the Roof


Book Description

This view of a life-altering moment in our history—captured from one photographer’s Brooklyn rooftop—is a testament to human hope and resilience, and what we’ve learned about living in community. The roof of a New York apartment building, like some New York neighbors, can be elusive—you could live there for years and never see it. The unique constraints of 2020’s quarantine drove photographer and Brooklyn transplant Josh Katz up to his Bushwick rooftop and introduced him to both. What he discovered there astonished him. Families, lovers, dogs, meditators, artists, exercise fanatics, daredevils, drinkers, dancers—in this strange time the world below had found a way to continue ticking on up above, subject to new patterns and distances. And then, there were the pigeon fanciers, who had been up there for decades, watching the neighborhood change around them. Josh reached for his camera. The project grew from a man’s attempt to cope with his own isolation to a tender portrait of his community—captured entirely from his own roof—and a resonant chronicle of how some of us found new hope and space in a life-altering year. Characters as heartfelt as any in the now-classic Humans of New York accompany Josh’s keen observations on urban space, human interaction, and new ways of city living we can bring down from the roof to apply in a post-quarantine world.




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




Librarian on the Roof! A True Story


Book Description

2012-2013 Show Me Readers Nominee List (Missouri) When RoseAleta Laurell begins her new job at the Dr. Eugene Clark Library in Lockhart, Texas, she is surprised that the children of the town think the library is for adults. She vows to raise the money for a children's section and spends a week living and working on the library roof, even surviving a dangerous storm. With the help of the entire town, RoseAleta raises over $39,000 from within the community and across the country. Today if you look through the front window of the Eugene Clark Library, you will see shelves stacked full with children's books and tables and chairs just the right size. You will see artwork on the walls, and a row of busy computers. Best of all, you will always find crowds of children who love to read and learn inside the walls of the oldest library in Texas.




Roof Life


Book Description

A celebrated art historian who has spent a lifetime looking at art writes about looking as a way of being in the world This is not a memoir. It does not take the form of a story. It is instead a kind of self-portrait, or perhaps several self-portraits. Svetlana Alpers had been keeping files: records of what she saw out the windows of her loft in New York; records of art sold, bought, or seen on her walls; records of foods found in markets and prepared in places where she lived; and records of herself seen in photographs, drawings, and paintings made by others. In solving the question of her father's place and date of birth, she reconstructs the life of her Russian grandfather in a distant and tumultuous Europe of a century ago. It was Roof Life that made it all come together. The title refers to what one discovers looking out from high windows with distant and distinctive views. In addition, it refers to the way one's attention is heightened and sharpened by confronting things that are unfamiliar, or that are made to appear unfamiliar by circumstances. It describes the immediacy of distance. Renowned art historian Svetlana Alpers assembles in these pages descriptions of things that mattered in a life that began in Cambridge, Massachusetts, continued in Berkeley, California, and is now lived in New York City. The experience of Europe informs it all.




The Room on the Roof


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The Most Beautiful Roof in the World


Book Description

From Newbery Honor author Kathryn Lasky comes a fascinating journey through the rainforest canopy that's perfect for budding environmentalists.




Dancing on the Edge of the Roof


Book Description

After a life of crime and poverty in her hometown of Columbus, Ohio, forty-two-year-old Juanita Lewis, craving a simpler life, drops everything, including her three grown, deadbeat children, to move to Montana. Reprint.