Changing Places


Book Description

A journalist chronicles her experiences with Medicare, lawyers, and basic human emotions as she helps her parents move into an assisted-living facility.




Changing Places


Book Description

When Philip Swallow and Professor Morris Zapp participate in their universities' Anglo-American exchange scheme, the Fates play a hand, and each academic finds himself enmeshed in the life of his counterpart on the opposite side of the Atlantic. Nobody is immune to the exchange: students, colleagues, even wives are swapped as events spiral out of control. And soon both sundrenched Euphoric State university and rain-kissed university of Rummidge are a hotbed of intrigue, lawlessness and broken vows...




A Life Spent Changing Places


Book Description

Landscape architect, urban planner, teacher, and social visionary: over the course of a sixty-year career, Lawrence Halprin (1916-2009) reshaped the spaces we inhabit and our ways of moving through them. The New York Times called him "the tribal elder of American landscape architecture" and the critic Ada Louise Huxtable credited him with creating what "may be one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance." His bold use of abstract imagery could evoke the landscape of the American West in a sequence of city squares and fountains, while his plan for repurposing an abandoned factory near San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf showed how adaptive use of a historic structure could turn commercial development into urban theater. A man who deeply loved cities, he left as one of his most important legacies the five thousand acres of coastline, hedgerows, and meadows that became Sonoma County's environmentally sensitive and enormously influential Sea Ranch. Featuring more than ninety black-and-white and one hundred color reproductions of photographs, plans, and sketchbooks, A Life Spent Changing Places is Halprin's own account of how a young boy who listened to the fireside chats of FDR on the radio became the man who designed the memorial to that president in the nation's capital. It is a book about the invention and reinvention of an extraordinary man over the span of decades and how he helped to reframe the world around him.




Personal Space


Book Description

"Features 99 drawings, an essay by Eva J. Friedberg, independent scholar of architectural history, urban studies and landscape theory; an introduction by Charles A. Birmbaum, President and CEO of The Cultural Landscape Foundation; and a poem by Halprin's grandson, Jahan Khalighi."--Amazon web page.




Four Thousand Weeks


Book Description

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Provocative and appealing . . . well worth your extremely limited time." —Barbara Spindel, The Wall Street Journal The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks. Nobody needs telling there isn’t enough time. We’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and the ceaseless battle against distraction; and we’re deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient, and “life hacks” to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks. Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern fixation on “getting everything done,” Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing how many of the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time aren’t inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we’ve made as individuals and as a society—and that we could do things differently.




The Undressing: Poems


Book Description

“Immediate, sensual, unrelentingly intense.” —NPR A breathtaking volume about the violence of desire and the peace of love from celebrated poet Li-Young Lee, The Undressing is a tonic for spiritual anemia; it attempts to uncover things hidden since the dawn of the world. Short of achieving that end, these mysterious, unassuming poems investigate the human violence and dispossession increasingly prevalent around the world, and the horrors the poet grew up with as a child of refugees. Lee draws from disparate sources including the Old Testament, the Dao De Jing, and the music of the Wu-Tang Clan. While the ostensive subjects of these layered, impassioned poems are wide-ranging, their driving engine is a burning need to understand our collective human mission.




City Choreographer


Book Description

One of the most prolific and influential landscape architects of the twentieth century, Lawrence Halprin (1916–2009) was best known for the FDR Memorial in Washington, D.C., and Sea Ranch, the iconic planned community in California. These projects, as well as vibrant public spaces throughout the country—from Ghirardelli Square and Market Street in San Francisco to Lovejoy Fountain Park in Portland and Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis—grew out of a participatory design process that was central to Halprin’s work and is proving ever more relevant to urban design today. In City Choreographer, urban designer and historian Alison Bick Hirsch explains and interprets this creative process, called the RSVP Cycles, referring to the four components: resources, score, valuation, and performance. With access to a vast archive of drawings and documents, Hirsch provides the first close-up look at how Halprin changed our ideas about urban landscapes. As an urban pioneer, he found his frontier in the nation’s densely settled metropolitan areas during the 1960s. Blurring the line between observer and participant, he sought a way to bring openness to the rigidly controlled worlds of architectural modernism and urban renewal. With his wife, Anna, a renowned avant-garde dancer and choreographer, Halprin organized workshops involving artists, dancers, and interested citizens that produced “scores,” which then informed his designs. City Choreographer situates Halprin within the larger social, artistic, and environmental ferment of the 1960s and 1970s. In doing so, it demonstrates his profound impact on the shape of landscape architecture and his work’s widening reach into urban and regional development and contemporary concerns of sustainability.




Death by Living


Book Description

Each of us is in the middle of a story. In this astoundingly unique book, bestselling author N.D. Wilson reminds us that to truly live we must recognize that we are dying. Cause of death: life. Death by Living is a poetic exploration of faith, futility, and the incredible joy of this mortal life. N.D. Wilson recounts stories from his life in poetic prose, giving perspective on the life we're given by God. Death by Living explores the topics of family, grappling with the death of loved ones, and how to live with intention to get the most out of our time on Earth. Wilson encourages us to live hard and die grateful, and to see Christ in every pair of eyes. To write a past we won’t regret. All of us must pause and breathe. See the past, see life as the fruit of providence and thousands of personal narratives. We did not choose where to set our feet in time, but we choose where to set them next. We stand in the now. God says create. Live. Choose. Shape the past. Etch your life in stone, and what you make will be forever. In Death by Living, you will: Experience life with renewed wonder Recognize mundane moments as opportunities Learn to live hard and die grateful Recognize death as a gift instead of something to be feared At once inspiring, humorous, and unbelievably moving, this a book that you will read again and again, finding fresh perspective each time you open it.




The Campus Trilogy


Book Description

"A trio of dazzling novels in a comic mode that the author has now made completely his own...a cause for celebration." -The New York Times Book Review David Lodge's three delightfully sophisticated campus novels, now gathered together in one volume, expose the world of academia at its best-and its worst. In Changing Places, we meet Philip Swallow, British lecturer in English at the University of Rummidge, and the flamboyant American Morris Zapp of Euphoric State University, who participate in a professorial exchange program at the close of the tumultuous sixties. Ten years later in Small World, older but not noticeably wiser, they are let loose on the international conference circuit-along with a memorable and somewhat oversexed cast of dozens. And in Nice Work, the leftist feminist Dr. Robyn Penrose at Rummidge University is assigned to shadow the director of a local engineering firm, sparking a collision of ideologies and lifestyles that seems unlikely to foster anything other than mutual antipathy.




Lawrence Halprin


Book Description

During a career spanning six decades, Lawrence Halprin (1916-2009) became one of the most prolific and outspoken landscape architects of his generation. He took on challenging new project types, developing a multidisciplinary practice while experimenting with adaptive reuse and ecological designs for new shopping malls, freeways, and urban parks. In his lifelong effort to improve the American landscape, Halprin celebrated the creative process as a form of social activism. A native New Yorker, Halprin earned degrees from Cornell and the University of Wisconsin before completing his design degree at Harvard. In 1945 he joined Thomas Church's firm, where he collaborated on the iconic Donnell Garden. He opened his own San Francisco office in 1949, where he initially focused on residential commissions in the Bay Area, completing close to three hundred in ten years' time. By the 1960s the firm had gained recognition for significant urban renewal projects such as Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco (1962-68), Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis (1962-67), and Freeway Park in Seattle (1970-74). Halprin used his conception of a Sierra stream as the catalyst for the Portland Open Space Sequence, a series of parks featuring great fountains that linked housing and civic space in the inner city. A charismatic speaker and passionate artist, Halprin designed landscapes that reflected the democratic and participatory ethic characteristic of his era. He communicated his ideas as well in lectures, books, exhibits, and performances. Along with his contemporary Ian McHarg, Halprin was his generation's great proselytizer for landscape architecture as environmental design. Throughout his long career, he strived to develop poetic and symbolic landscapes that, in his words, could "articulate a culture's most spiritual values."