"In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden, poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens. In resistance to the homogeneous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that...

A memoir of the steamboat era on the Mississippi River before the American Civil War. The first half details a brief history of the river from its discovery by Hernando de Soto in 1541 and describes Twain's career as a Mississippi steamboat pilot, the fulfillment of a childhood dream. The second half of Life on the Mississippi tells of Twain's return, many years after, to travel the river from St. Louis to New Orleans. By then the competition from...

Gives a description of the artist's Vermont home and garden as well as her "gardening secrets."

Bill McKibben meets Bill Bryson in this seriously engaging look at one man's decision to put his money where his mouth is and go off the grid for one year--while still living in New York City--to see if it's possible to make no net impact on the environment. In other words, no trash, no toxins in the water, no elevators, no subway, no products in packaging, no air-conditioning, no television. After this mad endeavor, Beavan explains to the rest of...

Peter Mayle and his wife had been to Provence as tourists. They had dreamed of one day trading the long, gray winters and damp summers of England for the blue skies and sunshine of the coast of southern France. And then they made it happen. They moved into an old farmhouse at the foot of the Luberon mountains and embarked on a wonderful, if at times bewildering, new life. Among their experiences that first year: being inundated with builders and visitors,...

A long-awaited second cookbook from celebrated architectural designer John Pawson and his wife Catherine Home Farm is the Pawson family's base in the heart of the English countryside. Five years in the making, the beautiful house was built to unite friends and relatives in a bucolic, simple setting. In this personal, inspiring recipe collection John and Catherine share 100 favourite dishes, all fundamental to their home-cooking - and entertaining...

Relates the history of Thomas Jefferson's home in western Virginia, including what life was like there for himself, his family, their slaves, visitors, and descendants, and how Monticello became a museum.

Part cultural meander, part memoir, Flâneuse traces the relationship between singular women and their cities as a way to map her own lifea journey that begins in New York and takes us to Paris, via Venice, Tokyo, and London, including the paths beaten by such flâneuses as the cross-dressing, nineteenth-century novelist George Sand, the Parisian artist Sophie Calle, the journalist Martha Gellhorn, and the writer Jean Rhys. With tenacity and insight,...