This book is a must for anyone planning to have a home built or contracting it themselves. Full of helpful hints, flow charts, and step-by-step planning advice, it shows a perspective seldom seen in home building. Written in a lighthearted manner with wit and wisdom, it is highlighted by dozens of "war stories" of building problems and how they were solved. This book will keep you out of trouble while providing a fuller understanding of the and the building process home building industry.

This easy to understand, step-by-step guide is clear enough for even a novice to understand, Even if you hire a contractor to build you home, this book will greatly help you understand the process. From shopping for a piece of land to getting a loan to dealing with a contractor, the Smiths' advice covers everything about building a home. The authors advise on getting organized and tackling the hardest parts of the process step by step. Included are valuable lists, charts, ideas and questionnaires. Also, how to shop around for bargains and minimize costs room by room.

Log Home Design is the preferred, trusted partner with readers in simplifying the process of becoming a log home owner. With its exclusive focus on planning and design, the magazine's friendly tone, practical content and targeted advertising provide the essential tools consumers need – from the crucial preliminary stages through the finishing touches of their dream log home.

Log Home Design is the preferred, trusted partner with readers in simplifying the process of becoming a log home owner. With its exclusive focus on planning and design, the magazine's friendly tone, practical content and targeted advertising provide the essential tools consumers need – from the crucial preliminary stages through the finishing touches of their dream log home.

Log Home Design is the preferred, trusted partner with readers in simplifying the process of becoming a log home owner. With its exclusive focus on planning and design, the magazine's friendly tone, practical content and targeted advertising provide the essential tools consumers need – from the crucial preliminary stages through the finishing touches of their dream log home.

The #1 national bestseller, now a major motion picture, 21—the amazing inside story about a gambling ring of M.I.T. students who beat the system in Vegas—and lived to tell how. Robin Hood meets the Rat Pack when the best and the brightest of M.I.T.’s math students and engineers take up blackjack under the guidance of an eccentric mastermind. Their small blackjack club develops from an experiment in counting cards on M.I.T.’s campus into a ring of card savants with a system for playing large and winning big. In less than two years they take some of the world’s most sophisticated casinos for more than three million dollars. But their success also brings with it the formidable ire of casino owners and launches them into the seedy underworld of corporate Vegas with its private investigators and other violent heavies.

"Glorious...one of the best memoirs I've read in years...a tragicomic gem about family, class, race, justice, and the spectacular weirdness of Wichita. [McDermott] can move from barely controlled hilarity to the brink of rage to aching tenderness in a single breath." -- Marya Hornbacher, New York Times Book Review Zack McDermott, a 26-year-old Brooklyn public defender, woke up one morning convinced he was being filmed, Truman Show-style, as part of an audition for a TV pilot. Every passerby was an actor; every car would magically stop for him; everything he saw was a cue from "The Producer" to help inspire the performance of a lifetime. After a manic spree around Manhattan, Zack, who is bipolar, was arrested on a subway platform and admitted to Bellevue Hospital. So begins the story of Zack's freefall into psychosis and his desperate, poignant, often hilarious struggle to claw his way back to sanity. It's a journey that will take him from New York City back to his Kansas roots and to the one person who might be able to save him, his tough, big-hearted Midwestern mother, nicknamed the Bird, whose fierce and steadfast love is the light in Zack's dark world. Before his odyssey is over, Zack will be tackled by guards in mental wards, run naked through cornfields, receive secret messages from the TV, befriend a former Navy Seal and his talking stuffed monkey, and see the Virgin Mary in the whorls of his own back hair. But with the Bird's help, he just might have a shot at pulling through, starting over, and maybe even meeting a partner who can love him back, bipolar and all. Introducing an electrifying new voice, Gorilla and the Bird is a raw and unforgettable account of a young man's unraveling and the relationship that saves him.