"Smart and defiant. Rich with characters and anecdote and heart. A great success." --Anthony Swofford, New York Times Book Review Has the futureever more people with their houses, stores, roads, and sprawlbeen wrecking your past? Melissa Holbrook Pierson, with unalloyed insight, elucidates how it feels to lose that landscape of home. In the past twenty years, like countless towns it resembles, Akron, Ohio, has lost its singularity, and much of what native-daughter Pierson loves about it. She then moves to Hoboken, New Jersey, a forgotten appendage of New Yorkuntil stockbrokers discover it. Finally, she speaks of rural areas, telling of the thousands of upstate New Yorkers displaced by city reservoirs. A unique book uniquely of our moment: This is what it feels like to lose the place you love.

Despite being part of one of the most mobile societies in history, it's easy for us to feel stuck where we are. Whether because of a recent move or because we're still in the exact same place we've been for years, many of us just aren't where we thought we'd be or doing what we thought we'd be doing. Sometimes we may wonder if God knows what he's doing. How can this be part of his plan? With enthusiasm and contagious joy, Shauna Pilgreen assures readers that, yes, God does have a plan and a purpose for them--right where they are. In fact, he sent them there. She invites readers to "live sent," showing them how to see their surroundings with fresh eyes and renewed energy. Weaving her own remarkable story with biblical habits readers can incorporate into their daily routines, Pilgreen equips us to reach out into our communities with God's love, knowing that our efforts are never in vain.

“A groundbreaking work about race and the American landscape, and a deep meditation on nature…wise and beautiful.”—Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk A Foreword Reviews Best Book of the Year and Nautilus Silver Award Winner In me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored. Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place “easy to pass by on the way somewhere else”—has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, readers meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.” By turns angry, funny, elegiac, and heartbreaking, The Home Place is a meditation on nature and belonging by an ornithologist and professor of ecology, at once a deeply moving memoir and riveting exploration of the contradictions of black identity in the rural South—and in America today. “When you’re done with The Home Place, it won’t be done with you. Its wonders will linger like everything luminous.”—Star Tribune “A lyrical story about the power of the wild…synthesizes his own family history, geography, nature, and race into a compelling argument for conservation and resilience.”—National Geographic

Some people are meant to travel the globe, to unwrap its secrets and share them with the world. And some people have no sense of direction, are terrified of pigeons, and get motion sickness from tying their shoes. These people are meant to stay home and eat nachos. Geraldine DeRuiter is the latter. But she won't let that stop her. Hilarious, irreverent, and heartfelt, All Over the Place chronicles the years Geraldine spent traveling the world after getting laid off from a job she loved. Those years taught her a great number of things, though the ability to read a map was not one of them. She has only a vague idea of where Russia is, but she now understands her Russian father better than ever before. She learned that what she thought was her mother's functional insanity was actually an equally incurable condition called "being Italian." She learned what it's like to travel the world with someone you already know and love -- how that person can help you make sense of things and make far-off places feel like home. She learned about unemployment and brain tumors, lost luggage and lost opportunities, and just getting lost in countless terminals and cabs and hotel lobbies across the globe. And she learned that sometimes you can find yourself exactly where you need to be -- even if you aren't quite sure where you are.

Joan Margarit is one of Spain's major modern writers. Born in 1938, he worked as an architect and first published his work in Spanish, but for the past four decades has become known for his mastery of the Catalan language, and is now, arguably, Spain's most widely acclaimed contemporary poet. The melancholy and candour of his poetry show his affinity with Thomas Hardy, whose work he has translated. In the much praised Tugs in the Fog: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2006), Joan Margarit evoked the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, the harshness of life in Barcelona under Franco, and grief at the death of a beloved handicapped daughter, reminding us that it is not death we have to understand but life. In his later collection, Strangely Happy (2011), he builds an architecture of the human spirit out of the unpromising materials of self-doubt, despair and death. Now, in Love Is a Place, which brings together his three most recent collections, he finds himself face to face with the prospect of his own death, while rediscovering love. 'Death is the final solitude,' he writes in 'On the ground', but the image at the end of the poem is one of hope, of love, and of home, not 'the skeleton with the scythe that Durer engraved' but 'a brightly-lit window in a dark street.' The three collections see him moving from despair to self-knowledge, confronting his old demons with honesty and courage. Love, it seems, is not after all 'hard or far away', nor was the signal lost, because, in the poet's words, 'Love is a place. / It endures beyond everything: from there we come. / And it's the place where life remains.'

"Jonathan Lear has shown us both Freud`s texts and his subject matter from a new angle of vision, one that renders much recent controversy about psychoanalytic theory irrelevant. For any student of those texts this book is indispensable."--Alasdair MacIntyre "Lear makes one understand how psychoanalysis works not only on the therapist`s couch but also as a condition of being alive. . . . Love and Its Place in Nature not only offers a form of spiritual nutriment for the self, it also defines that self with a clear profundity that few readers will have encountered before."--Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times "A brief and engaging philosophical perspective on Freudian psychoanalysis. The book is simply written, but important themes are profoundly investigated. . . . An important philosophic reading of Freud."--Don Browning, Christian Century In this brilliant book, Jonathan Lear argues that Freud posits love as a basic force in nature, one that makes individuation--the condition for psychological health and development--possible. Love is active not just in the development of the individual but also in individual analysis and indeed in the development of psychoanalysis itself, says Lear. Expanding on philosophical conceptions of love, nature, and mind, Lear shows that love can cure because it is the force that makes us human.

For young children, the excitement of doing mitzvos lurks around the nearest corner and goes along from room to room! The Place that I Love details which mitzvos are connected to each part of a Jewish home... kashrus in the kitchen, Torah learning in the study, having guests in the bedroom, and the joy of a warm family Shabbos meal in the dining room.Beautiful illustrations bring each scene to life, as a young boy guides the reader through the place that he loves best... his Jewish home, a place Hashem, and the entire family are proud of.

Christians know church is important, but sometimes it doesn't seem worth it. An eclectic assortment of people with differing personalities, political views, and parenting styles can make for awkward interactions and difficult connections. What’s the point of putting in the tough work to build relationships? But the Bible says God’s people ought to be bound together. It uses words like beloved, brothers and sisters, saints, and fellow laborers to describe their mutual relationship in the church. In this book, Megan Hill answers a common question of churchgoers: What’s so great about the church? With rich theology, practical direction, and study questions for group use, Hill encourages and equips both first-time visitors and regular members to delight in being a part of the local church—no matter how messy and ordinary it seems today. It is only when God’s people begin to see one another as the Lord sees them that they will truly find a place to belong.

The word “terroir” refers to the climate and soil in which something is grown. Natasha Sajé applies this idea to the environments that nurture and challenge us, exploring in particular how the immigrant experience has shaped her identity. She revisits people and literature across her life, including her experiences as the child of European refugees in suburban New Jersey, taken under the wing of a widowed neighbor; a winter spent waitressing in Switzerland; her marriage to a Jamaican man in Baltimore; and finally her marriage to a woman in Salt Lake City. This memoir-in-essays combines poetic lyricism with incisive commentary on nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and class. Reminding us that change is constant in our lives, Sajé asks how terroir creates identity. Throughout, the English language is her most fertile ground.

Presents a step-by-step home decorating guide to creating stylish and innovative rooms that reflect an individual's true personality, interests, tastes, and lifestyle, with photographs that provide inspirational ideas and techniques.