Welcome to the Agrihood: Living, Shopping, and Gardening for a Farm-to-Table Lifestyle


Anna DeSimoneAnna DeSimone - 2020
    Award-winning author Anna DeSimone explains all the ways that sustainably sourced, locally grown food is healthier, preserves farmland, and lowers your carbon footprint. LIVE IN AGRIHOOD, an eco-friendly, healthy-lifestyle community centered around a professionally managed farm. Discover why agrihoods are winning awards across the nation for "best places to live." You can have a beautiful, sustainably built home with the latest energy conservation features, and yet be surrounded by pastoral landscapes and natural habitat. This book takes you through a virtual tour of agrihoods, known for amenities such as charter K-12 schools, clubhouses, fitness centers, boating, golf, horseback riding, swimming, walking, hiking, and biking trails. Best of all, many are surprisingly close to major cities and metro areas. ORGANIC ROOFTOP FARMS are the newest trend in multifamily housing, where tenants can take the elevator to shop for fresh food, or perhaps dine at the on-site café where meals are prepared with food from the chef's garden. Many apartment complexes are incorporating community gardens into the landscape or offering individual raised-bed gardens for tenants to grow their own produce. GROW YOUR OWN ORGANIC FOOD on your porch, balcony, or in your backyard with helpful tips, planting guides, and valuable resources about sustainable, chemical-free, and environmentally friendly growing methods. This book teaches the basics of organic certification, food safety, biodiversity, beekeeping, soil testing, composting, and local laws. With infographics and clear commentary, readers will understand how sustainable agriculture helps the environment, and how far food travels. You might be inspired to start planting microgreens indoors after learning about aeroponics, hydroponics, and aquaponics. SHOP FROM THE FARMER YOU KNOW and learn the story behind your food. This book illustrates the "harvest season," and describes the scope of food products and pick-your-own options at "on-farm" markets. You'll learn about "food hubs," mission-based organizations dedicated to sustainable agriculture, fair trade, social, and environmental causes. Food hubs bring together local farmers, fisheries, ranchers, and artisans. By enrolling in a season-long "farm share" program known as "Community-Supported Agriculture" your family can enjoy fresh, healthy food and connect with the people who plant, manage and harvest your food. Contents:•The Local Food Sensation•Say Hello to Your Farmer•Urban Agriculture•Agrihoods•Backyard Farming•Community-Supported Agriculture (CSAs)•On-Farm Markets•Food HubsBOOK INCLUDES A NATIONAL DIRECTORY OF AGRIHOODS AND LISTS OVER 2,200 RESOURCES TO BUY FRESH, LOCALLY GROWN FOOD.

The DIRTY, LAZY, KETO 5-Ingredient Cookbook: 100 Easy-Peasy Recipes Low in Carbs, Big on Flavor


Stephanie Laska - 2021
    After losing 140 pounds on the keto diet, bestselling author Stephanie Laska makes the keto diet more accessible and foolproof than ever before with these 100 delicious recipes made with only 5 (or fewer) main ingredients! The easy-going approach of The DIRTY, LAZY KETO 5-Ingredient Cookbook makes weight loss manageable, sustainable, and even fun. Packed with her trademark sass and practical advice, Stephanie teaches the proven fundamentals of dirty keto cooking in a way that gets you excited and motivated. You’ll find 100 easy, great-tasting classic recipes that the entire family will enjoy—even the pickiest eaters. Making the keto diet more convenient than ever, this is a flexible, honest, real-world approach to losing weight that anyone can accomplish. In this cookbook, you’ll find no judgment—just plenty of support to help you pursue your own unique path to sustainable healthy weight loss—not perfection. This is lazy keto at its finest!

The Kings of the Sea (The Saga of Hasting the Avenger Book 3)


C.J. Adrien - 2021
    With his heart turned black, he rekindles the savagery of his race. In sacking Nantes, his bravery and luck earn him a place in the skalds' songs. Word of his deeds reaches his kin in the North, and more and more sea captains sail to Francia to join him, hoping his luck might help theirs.Thor of Dublin, Hasting's old rival, will seek him out and ask him to join his new alliance of sea kings. Together, they will launch the most ambitious raids their people have ever attempted. They will sail south to the land of the Moors to test their alliance's strength and, if successful, turn their sights to an even more daring prize: Paris.The Norns make nothing easy. A secret affair will risk unraveling the alliance and bring the sea kings to the brink of civil war.

Wish It Lasted Forever: Life with the Larry Bird Celtics


Dan Shaughnessy - 2021
    But it wasn’t always this successful. Before primetime ESPN coverage, lucrative branding deals like Air Jordans, and $40 million annual player salaries, there was the NBA of the 1970s and 1980s—when basketball was still an up-and-coming sport featuring old school beat reporters and players who wore Converse All-Stars.Enter Dan Shaughnessy, then the beat reporter for TheBoston Globe who covered the Boston Celtics every day from 1982 to 1986. It was a time when reporters travelled with professional teams—flying the same commercial airlines, riding the same buses, and staying in the same hotels. Shaughnessy knew the athletes as real people, losing free throw bets to Larry Bird, being gifted cheap cigars by the iconic coach Red Auerbach, and having his one-year-old daughter Sarah passed from player to player on a flight from Logan to Detroit Metro.Drawing on unprecedented access and personal experiences that would not be possible for any reporter today, Shaughnessy takes us inside the legendary Larry Bird-led Celtics teams, capturing the camaraderie as they dominated the NBA. Fans can witness the cockiness of Larry Bird (who once walked into an All-Star Weekend locker room, announced that he was going to win the three-point contest, and did); the ageless athleticism of Robert Parish; the shooting skills of Kevin McHale; the fierce, self-sacrificing play of Bill Walton; and the playful humor of players like Danny Ainge, Cedric “Cornbread” Maxwell, and M.L. Carr.

Homo Irrealis: Essays


André Aciman - 2021
    Irrealis moods are also known as counterfactual moods and include the conditional, the subjunctive, the optative, and the imperative--all best expressed in this book as the might-be and the might-have-been. One of the great prose stylists of his generation, Andr� Aciman returns to the essay form in Homo Irrealis to explore what time means to artists who cannot grasp life in the present. Irrealis moods are not about the present or the past or the future; they are about what might have been but never was but could in theory still happen. From meditations on subway poetry and the temporal resonances of an empty Italian street to considerations of the lives and work of Sigmund Freud, C. P. Cavafy, W. G. Sebald, John Sloan, �ric Rohmer, Marcel Proust, and Fernando Pessoa and portraits of cities such as Alexandria and St. Petersburg, Homo Irrealis is a deep reflection on the imagination's power to forge a zone outside of time's intractable hold.

The Insurmountable Edge


Thomas H. GoodfellowThomas H. Goodfellow - 2020
    Top employees of a U.S. defense contractor dying at an alarming rate. A cryptic message sent by a strange, secretive source warns the contractor’s products have been corrupted and could be used against the U.S. Armed Forces.They all seem to be connected. But how?Only two men on earth are capable of putting it all together and those men are Jack Wilder and Jeff Bradshaw, two of the greatest special operations forces soldiers who have ever lived.There's a problem though. Jack and Jeff are off-duty at Jack’s ranch while Jeff tries to recover from a severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder. Jack's seventeen-year-old ward, a hellcat named Adelaide, is also on the ranch. Nothing seems more impossible than getting the three of them to leave their safe commune. But then, a mysterious blue Maybach shows up at the ranch. The Maybach's visit sends Adelaide, Jack and Jeff off on a dangerous trail of murder and intrigue as they confront the insurmountable edge.“Thomas H. Goodfellow’s timely political thriller The Insurmountable Edge imagines a world in which the US and China move close to open warfare.” - Benjamin Welton, ForewordReviews.com

Rhapsody


Mitchell James Kaplan - 2021
    The piece: Rhapsody in Blue. The composer: a brilliant, elusive young musical genius named George Gershwin. Kay is transfixed, helpless to resist the magnetic pull of George’s talent, charm, and swagger. Their ten-year love affair, complicated by her conflicted loyalty to her husband and the twists and turns of her own musical career, ends only with George’s death from a brain tumor at the age of thirty-eight. Set in Jazz Age New York City, this stunning work of fiction, for fans of The Paris Wife and Loving Frank, explores the timeless bond between two brilliant, strong-willed artists. George Gershwin left behind not just a body of work unmatched in popular musical history, but a woman who loved him with all her heart, knowing all the while that he belonged not to her, but to the world.

By the Grace of the Game: The Holocaust, a Basketball Legacy, and an Unprecedented American Dream


Dan Grunfeld - 2021
    The boy who escaped to America with them, who was bullied as he struggled to learn English and cope with family tragedy, was now a young man who had discovered and secretly honed his basketball talent on the outdoor courts of New York City. That young man was Ernie Grunfeld, who would go on to win an Olympic gold medal and reach previously unimaginable heights as an NBA player and executive. In By the Grace of the Game, Dan Grunfeld, once a basketball standout himself at Stanford University, shares the remarkable story of his family, a delicately interwoven narrative that doesn't lack in heartbreak yet remains as deeply nourishing as his grandmother's Hungarian cooking, so lovingly described. The true improbability of the saga lies in the discovery of a game that unknowingly held the power to heal wounds, build bridges, and tie together a fractured Jewish family. If the magnitude of an American dream is measured by the intensity of the nightmare that came before and the heights of the triumph achieved after, then By the Grace of the Game recounts an American dream story of unprecedented scale.From the grips of the Nazis to the top of the Olympic podium, from the cheap seats to center stage at Madison Square Garden, from yellow stars to silver spoons, this complex tale traverses the spectrum of the human experience to detail how perseverance, love, and legacy can survive through generations, carried on the shoulders of a simple and beautiful game.

An Honest Lie


Tarryn FisherTarryn Fisher
    You’d better come if you want to save her.”  Lorraine—“Rainy”—lives at the top of Tiger Mountain. Remote, moody, cloistered in pine trees and fog, it’s a sanctuary, a new life. She can hide from the disturbing past she wants to forget. If she’s allowed to. When Rainy reluctantly agrees to a girls’ weekend in Vegas, she’s prepared for an exhausting parade of shots and slot machines. But after a wild night, her friend Braithe doesn’t come back to the hotel room. And then Rainy gets the text message, sent from Braithe’s phone: someone has her. But Rainy is who they really want, and Rainy knows why. What follows is a twisted, shocking journey on the knife-edge of life and death. If she wants to save Braithe—and herself—the only way is to step back into the past. This seething, gut-punch of a thriller can only have sprung from the fiendish brain of Tarryn Fisher, one of the most cunning writers of our time.Looking for more great reads by Tarryn Fisher? Don't miss The Wives and The Wrong Family.

Moth


Melody Razak
    Fourteen-year-old Alma is soon to be married despite her parents' fear that she is far too young. But times are perilous in India, where the country's long-awaited independence from the British empire heralds a new era of hope--and danger. In its wake, political unrest ripples across the subcontinent, marked by violent confrontations between Hindus and Muslims. The conflict threatens to unravel the rich tapestry of Delhi--a city where different cultures, religions, and traditions have co-existed for centuries. The solution is partition, which will create a new, wholly Muslim, sovereign nation--Pakistan--carved from India's northwestern shoulder. Given the uncertain times, Alma's parents, intellectuals who teach at the local university, pray that marriage will provide Alma with stability and safety.Precocious and headstrong, Alma's excitement over the wedding rivals only her joy in spinning wild stories about evil spirits for her younger sister Roop. But when Alma's grandmother--a woman determined to protect the family's honor no matter the cost--interferes with the engagement, her meddling sets off a chain of events that will wrench the family apart, forcing its members to find new and increasingly desperate ways to survive in the wake of partition.Set during the most tumultuous years in modern Indian history, Melody Razak recreates the painful turmoil of a rupturing nation and its reverberations across the fates of a single family. Powerfully evocative and atmospheric, Moth is a testament to survival and a celebration of the beauty and resiliency of the human spirit.

Interesting Women


Andrea Lee - 2002
    In “The Birthday Present,” a loyal and conventional American wife explores the wilder shores of marital devotion by giving her Italian husband a costly present. “Winter Barley” is the account, alternately lyrical and perverse, of the brief love affair in Scotland between an elderly European prince and a thoroughly modern New England beauty half his age. And in the collection’s title story, “Interesting Women,” a woman on vacation in Thailand reflects with wry detachment on the confessional relationships that spring up between women (“another day, another soul laid bare”), before falling into one herself, which culminates in a hilarious and absurd odyssey through the jungle. Lee’s beautifully crafted stories offer a rare combination: a sensual evocation of the moment, and profound insight into the underlying struggles—of gender, race, and class—that continue to shape our world. Critically acclaimed when it was first published, this collection is ready to be embraced by a new generation of readers.

The King's Shadow: Obsession, Betrayal, and the Deadly Quest for the Lost City of Alexandria


Edmund Richardson
    For centuries the city of Alexandria Beneath the Mountains was a meeting point of East and West. Then it vanished. In 1833 it was discovered in Afghanistan by the unlikeliest person imaginable: Charles Masson, deserter, pilgrim, doctor, archaeologist, spy, one of the most respected scholars in Asia, and the greatest of nineteenth-century travelers.On the way into one of history's most extraordinary stories, he would take tea with kings, travel with holy men and become the master of a hundred disguises; he would see things no westerner had glimpsed before and few have glimpsed since. He would spy for the East India Company and be suspected of spying for Russia at the same time, for this was the era of the Great Game, when imperial powers confronted each other in these staggeringly beautiful lands. Masson discovered tens of thousands of pieces of Afghan history, including the 2,000-year-old Bimaran golden casket, which has upon it the earliest known face of the Buddha. He would be offered his own kingdom; he would change the world, and the world would destroy him.This is a wild journey through nineteenth-century India and Afghanistan, with impeccably researched storytelling that shows us a world of espionage and dreamers, ne'er-do-wells and opportunists, extreme violence both personal and military, and boundless hope. At the edge of empire, amid the deserts and the mountains, it is the story of an obsession passed down the centuries.

Instinct: A Novel


Jason M. Hough - 2021
    Welcome to Silvertown. Population: 602 (for now). Officer Mary Whittaker has yet to be fully welcomed by the residents of this tiny, quirky mountain town which seems to be home to more conspiracy theories than any other place in America. But with the chief of police on leave, she is left alone to confront a series of abnormal incidents—strange even by Silvertown standards. A teenager dies tragically after eating obviously poisonous mushrooms from his lawn. A hiker found dead on a trail, smiling serenely after being mauled by a bear. A normally doting mother leaving her toddler twins behind without noticing. Other residents seem to have lost all sense of self-preservation as they walk out in front of Mary’s moving cruiser or sit placidly in the middle of a sharp bend in a mountain road. It’s almost as if the townsfolk are losing their survival instincts, one by one. As she digs deeper into her investigation and uncovers a larger conspiracy lurking below the surface of Silvertown, Officer Whittaker finds herself on the brink of falling prey to whatever has possessed the town and she must distinguish the truth from paranoia-fueled lies before she ends up losing her own instincts…and her life.

The Lady Whose Mouth I Set on Fire: True Tales from the ER


Dr. McAnonymousDr. McAnonymous - 2021
    They are first-hand accounts told by an old, tired physician who has survived three decades in this odd, but exciting world of life and death. They are heartwarming, heart-wrenching, hilarious or fascinating. This book is for anyone interested in the inner belly of the Human Being. There is much to be learned and felt here. Beware, this book is not for everyone, and you may begin laughing at inappropriate times—or even develop nightmares.

The Last Hunter


J.N. ChaneyJ.N. Chaney - 2022
    Actions speak louder than words. The Confederation doesn’t think the Locusts are coming back.But what if the politicians are wrong?Snared in a scheme he doesn’t fully understand or trust, Jack gets his promotion, but it comes with a catch. With a crew of rejects, he must restore the most powerful warship humanity has ever built, after centuries of neglect and decay, before time runs out.If he fails, humanity might not need to worry about history repeating itself ever again.