America has lost its moral authority to huge corporate interests, say Secession movement leaders. This remarkable dossier shows how a seemingly wild political idea continues to grow and create debate on the US' unsustainable, ungovernable and unfixable empire.

In this "passionate, reflective, inspiring, endlessly quotable" (Allen Lacy, New York Times Book Review) book, two acclaimed landscape designers offer a month-by-month chronicle of their magnificent Vermont garden. "A gold mine of practical advice".--Anne Raver, The New York Times.

It's Probably Nothing continues the tale woven by Dr. Beach Conger in his first book, Bag Balm and Duct Tape. This new collection sees Conger and his wife yearning for new challenges and relocating to the suburbs of Philadelphia after 25 years in mythical Dumster, Vermont. Conger gamely takes a job in a teaching hospital in the poorest part of the city and gets to experience urban bureaucratized medicine and its trials- a far cry from the more idiosyncratic and hands-on version he practiced in Vermont. After 5 years Conger and his wife move back to Dumster, where he rediscovers more about his patients' capacity to both cope and cherish one another than he expected. Each of the tightly constructed chapters is centered around a particular patient or particular theme in medicine. It's Probably Nothing is both funny and poignant, and showcases both Conger's irreverent view into medicine and his profound empathy for the characters he encounters along the way. His experience highlights how medicine-and problems with out current medical system-can remain the same and yet be vastly different across class, race, and region. Among the people the reader meets are urban drag queens, small-town farmers and other heroes, Vermont celebrities, and the occasional reclusive author.

The extraordinary story of the small Vermont town that has likely produced more Olympians per capita than any other place in the country, Norwich gives “parents of young athletes a great gift—a glimpse at another way to raise accomplished and joyous competitors” (The Washington Post). In Norwich, Vermont—a charming town of organic farms and clapboard colonial buildings—a culture has taken root that’s the opposite of the hypercompetitive schoolyard of today’s tiger moms and eagle dads. In Norwich, kids aren’t cut from teams. They don’t specialize in a single sport, and they even root for their rivals. What’s more, their hands-off parents encourage them to simply enjoy themselves. Yet this village of roughly three thousand residents has won three Olympic medals and sent an athlete to almost every Winter Olympics for the past thirty years. Now, New York Times reporter and “gifted storyteller” (The Wall Street Journal) Karen Crouse spills Norwich’s secret to raising not just better athletes than the rest of America but happier, healthier kids. And while these “counterintuitive” (Amy Chua, bestselling author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother) lessons were honed in the New England snow, parents across the country will find that “Crouse’s message applies beyond a particular town or state” (The Wall Street Journal). If you’re looking for answers about how to raise joyful, resilient kids, let Norwich take you to a place that has figured it out.

In this second edition of their classic text, Klyza and Trombulak use the lens of interconnectedness to examine the geological, ecological, and cultural forces that came together to produce contemporary Vermont. They assess the changing landscape and its inhabitants from its pre-human evolution up to the present, with special focus on forests, open terrestrial habitats, and the aquatic environment. This edition features a new chapter covering from 1995 to 2013 and a thoroughly revised chapter on the futures of Vermont, which include discussions of Tropical Storm Irene, climate change, eco-regional planning, and the resurgence of interest in local food and energy production. Integrating key themes of ecological change into a historical narrative, this book imparts specific information about Vermont, speculates on its future, and fosters an appreciation of the complex synergy of forces that shaped this region. This volume will interest scholars, students, and Vermonters intrigued by the state's long-term natural and human history.

The city has eight million stories, and this one unfolds just south of 14th Street in Manhattan, mostly on the seven blocks of Fourth Avenue bracketed by Union Square and Astor Place. There, for nearly eight decades, from the 1890s to the 1960s, thrived a bibliophiles' paradise. They called it the New York Booksellers' Row, or, more commonly, Book Row. It's an American story, the story that this richly anecdotal historical memoir amiably tells: as American as the rags-to-riches tale of the Strand, which began its life as book stall on Eighth Street and today houses 2.5 million volumes in twelve miles of space. It's a story cast with colorful characters: like the horse-betting, poker-playing go-getter and book dealer George D. Smith; the irascible Russian-born book hunter Peter Stammer, the visionary Theodore C. Schulte; Lou Cohen, founder of the still-surviving Argosy Book Store; gentleman bookseller George Rubinowitz and his legendary shrewd wife Jenny. Rising rents, street crime, urban redevelopment, television-the reasons are many for the demise of Book Row, but in this volume, based on interviews with dozens upon dozens of the book people who bought, sold, and collected there, it lives again.

In 1819, kidnapped chef Owen Wedgwood transforms meager shipboard supplies into sumptuous meals at the behest of his kidnapper, pirate queen Mad Hannah Mabbot, while she pushes her exhausted crew to track down a deadly privateer.

Hailed as "one of the three finest wits of her day," the Countess Elizabeth von Arnim cemented her literary reputation with this companion work to her extraordinarily popular first novel, the semi-autobiographical Elizabeth and Her German Garden (also available from Cosimo Classics). First published in 1899, this is a proto-feminist account of one woman's attempt to carve out of a space of her own-away from the husband she only half jokingly refers to as her "Man of Wrath"-in the rambling gardens of the family's county estate. By turns bitingly satirical and achingly lovely, this will delight fans of von Armin's friends and fellow writers E.M. Forster and Katherine Mansfield. British novelist ELIZABETH VON ARNIM (1866-1941) is also the author of Enchanted April.

When young Dr. Beach Conger accepted a hospital appointment in rural Vermont, it was a mail-order marriage without either party seeing the other. He envisioned living out the rest of his days splitting wood, healing the sick, and being adored as a kindly country doctor. His new patients figured they had their work cut out for them, breaking in this whippersnapper M.D. from Berkeley, California. Beach Conger's tale of his training in the art of country doctoring is a joy. Listen in on the hilarious consultations as he finds a cure for vitaminia, induces laconic Vermonters to talk about "private" problems, and even reconstructs the formula for the "Green Pills" his predecessor invented. He especially brings home that most basic consideration -- the need for every doctor to be supervised by a responsible person, i.e., a nurse. "An engaging blend of rustic wisdom and big-city know-how." -- Publishers Weekly