Her new preface considers the geisha today as a vestige of tradition as Japan heads into the 21st century.

    Frida Ramstedt believes in thinking about how we decorate, rather than focusing on what we decorate with. We know more today than ever before about design trends, furniture, and knickknacks, and now Frida familiarizes readers with the basic principles behind interior and styling--what looks good and, most of all, why it looks good.The Interior Design Handbook teaches you general rules of thumb--like what the golden ratio and the golden spiral are, the proper size for a coffee table in relation to your sofa, the optimal height to hang lighting fixtures, and the best ways to use a mood board--complete with helpful illustrations. Use The Interior Design Handbook to achieve a balanced, beautiful home no matter where you live or what your style is.

    With arresting clarity, Journeys of Simplicity offers vignettes of forty travelers and the few, ordinary things they carried with them-from place to place, from day to day, from birth to death.

    . . A superb outing from a gifted young critic that will spark joy in many readers." - Kirkus Reviews, starred review“Less is more”: Everywhere we hear the mantra. Marie Kondo and other decluttering gurus promise that shedding our stuff will solve our problems. We commit to cleanse diets and strive for inbox zero. Amid the frantic pace and distraction of everyday life, we covet silence-and airy, Instagrammable spaces in which to enjoy it. The popular term for this brand of upscale austerity, “minimalism,” has mostly come to stand for things to buy and consume. But minimalism has richer, deeper, and altogether more valuable gifts to offer.Kyle Chayka is one of our sharpest cultural observers. After spending years covering minimalist trends for leading publications, he now delves beneath this lifestyle's glossy surface, seeking better ways to claim the time and space we crave. He shows that our longing for less goes back further than we realize. His search leads him to the philosophical and spiritual origins of minimalism, and to the stories of artists such as Agnes Martin and Donald Judd; composers such as John Cage and Julius Eastman; architects and designers; visionaries and misfits. As Chayka looks anew at their extraordinary lives and explores the places where they worked-from Manhattan lofts to the Texas high desert and the back alleys of Kyoto-he reminds us that what we most require is presence, not absence. The result is an elegant new synthesis of our minimalist desires and our profound emotional needs.

    Taro would wear the historic dark blue uniform and learn alongside other little Einsteins while she basked in the glory of his high achievements with the other perfect moms. Together they would climb the rungs into the country's successful elite. But it didn't turn out that way. Taro had other things in mind.While set in Japan, their struggles in the school's hyper-competitive environment mirror those faced by parents here in the US and raise the same questions about the best way to educate a child—especially one that doesn’t quite fit the mold. Public or private? Competitive or nurturing? Standardized or individualized. Helicopter parenting or free-range? Amid this frenzied debate, how does one find balance and maintain a healthy parent-child relationship?Dear Diary Boy is an intensely personal, heartwarming, and heartbreaking chronicle of one mother and child's experience in a prestigious private Tokyo school. It's a tale that will resonate with all parents as we try to answer the age-old questions of how best to educate our children and what, truly, is in their best interests versus what is in our own.

    Throughout Europe and America, artists and intellectuals banded together to portray women as static and unindividuated beings who functioned solely in a sexual and reproductive capacity, thus formulating many of the anti-feminine platitudes that today still constrain women's potential. Bram Dijkstra's Idols of Perversity explores the nature and development of turn-of-the-century misogyny in the works of hundreds of writers, artists, and scientists, including Zola, Strindberg, Wedekind, Henry James, Rossetti, Renoir, Moreau, Klimt, Darwin, and Spencer. Dijkstra demonstrates that the most prejudicial aspects of Evolutionary Theory helped to justify this wave of anti-feminine sentiment. The theory claimed that the female of the species could not participate in the great evolutionary process that would guide the intellectual male to his ultimate, predestined role as a disembodied spiritual essence. Darwinists argued that women hindered this process by their willingness to lure men back to a sham paradise of erotic materialism. To protect the male's continued evolution, artists and intellectuals produced a flood of pseudo-scientific tracts, novels, and paintings which warned the world's males of the evils lying beneath the surface elegance of woman's tempting skin. Reproducing hundreds of pictures from the period and including in-depth discussions of such key works as Dracula and Venus in Furs, this fascinating book not only exposes the crucial links between misogyny then and now, but also connects it to the racism and anti-semitism that led to catastrophic genocidal delusions in the first half of the twentieth century. Crossing the conventional boundaries of art history, sociology, the history of scientific theory, and literary analysis, Dijkstra unveils a startling view of a grim and largely one-sided war on women still being fought today.

    Bronowski's exciting, illustrated investigation offers a perspective not just on science, but on civilization itself. Lower than the angelsForewordThe harvest of the seasons The grain in the stoneThe hidden structure The music of the spheresThe starry messanger The majestic clockworkThe drive for power The ladder of creation World within world Knowledge or certainty Generation upon generationThe long childhoodBibliographyIndex

    His name is Tadao Ando, and he is one of the world's greatest living architects. Combining influences from Japanese tradition with the best of Modernism, Ando has developed a completely unique building aesthetic that makes use of concrete, wood, water, light, space, and nature in a way that has never been witnessed elsewhere in architecture. This book provides the perfect introduction to Ando's work, including private homes, churches, museums, apartment complexes, and cultural spaces throughout Japan, and in France, Italy, Spain, and the USA.

    These micro-decorating ideas from Country Living add beauty to every room, whether you’re swapping your old coffee table for an antique bench, creating an eye-catching display in a passageway, or energizing your bedroom by playing with different patterns. You’ll discover new possibilities for things to do, make, buy, and repurpose, and every chapter shows how to revive any space, from living and dining rooms to entryways, mudrooms, home offices, and porches.

    This compendium of early Japanese life provides a panorama of Japan during its formation.

    Gandhi, called Mahatma (“great soul”), was the father of modern India, but his influence has spread well beyond the subcontinent, and is as important today as it was in the first part of the twentieth century, and during this nation’s own civil rights movement. Taken from Gandhi’s writings throughout his life. The Essential Gandhi introduces us to his thoughts on politics, spirituality, poverty, suffering, love, non-violence, civil disobedience, and his own life. The pieces collected here, with explanatory head-notes by Gandhi biographer Louis Fischer, offer the clearest, most thorough portrait of one of the greatest spiritual leaders the world has known.“Gandhi was inevitable. If humanity is to progress, Gandhi is inescapable... We may ignore him at our own risk.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.With a new Preface drawn from the writings of Eknath EaswaranIn the annals of spirituality certain books stand out both for their historical importance and for their continued relevance. The Vintage Spiritual Classics series offers the greatest of these works in authoritative new editions, with specially commissioned essays by noted contemporary commentators. Filled with eloquence and fresh insight, encouragement and solace, Vintage Spiritual Classics are incomparable resources for all readers, who seek a more substantive understanding of mankind's relation to the divine.

    In a crowded wellness space, Kintsugi Wellness truly stands out."-Sophia Amoruso, founder and CEO, GirlbossThe 16 Most Exciting Cookbooks Coming Out in 2018--Brit + CoWhere we come from is who we are. And Candice Kumai’s Japanese heritage has guided her journey back to health at every turn. Now, in Kintsugi Wellness, Candice shares what she’s learned and guides us through her favorite Japanese traditions and practices for cultivating inner strength and living a gracious life, interwoven with dozens of recipes for healthy, Japanese-inspired cuisine. Kintsugi Wellness provides the tools we all need to reclaim the art of living well.

    House Beautiful Style Essentials: What Every Room Needs is an inspiring and hardworking handbook that shows readers how to create the rooms of their dreams by revealing what “every room needs.” Chapters like “Every Room Needs a Hiding Place” provide clever ideas for storage and organization, while sections like “Every Room Needs Something Shiny” give examples of how reflective surfaces can enhance and enlarge any space. Simple yet elegant advice from some of the biggest names in the interiors world is paired throughout with stunning photography of the best and most beautiful rooms featured in the magazine. From a room’s overall look and color down to its smallest details, House Beautiful Style Secrets provides tips, tricks, and secrets on how to cultivate a comfortable home and uncover the potential of every living space.

    Yet most of us utter that sound every day. And have used it all our lives...Uh-oh is way up near the top of a list of small syllables with large meanings...Uh-oh...is a frame of mind. A philosophy. It says to expect the unexpected., and also expect to be able to deal with it as it happens most of the time. Uh-oh people seem not only to expect surprise, but they count on it, as if surprise were a dimension of vitality."These words from the opening of Uh-oh describe a special vitality that, in fact, infuses the writings of Robert Fulghum with the incomparable joie de vivre and sense of wonder that have made his books, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten and It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It, modern classic, translated into twenty-five languages.In this third volume, Fulghum explores a variety of subjects from both sides of the refrigerator door—from meatloaf to the Salvation Army Band, from fireflies to funerals, from hiccups to a watch without hands. One again, Fulghum celebrates everyday life in all its richness, subtly weaving a theme of balance throughout, balance between the mundane and the holy, between humor and grief, and between what is and what might be.

    The seventeen-syllable form is rooted in a Japanese tradition of close observation of nature, of making poetry from subtle suggestion. Infused by its great practitioners with the spirit of Zen Buddhism, the haiku has served as an example of the power of direct observation to the first generation of American modernist poets like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and also as an example of spontaneity and Zen alertness to the new poets of the 1950s. This definitive collection brings together in fresh translations by an American poet the essential poems of the three greatest haiku masters: Matsuo Basho in the seventeenth century; Yosa Buson in the eighteenth century; and Kobayashi Issa in the early nineteenth century. Robert Hass has written a lively and informed introduction, provided brief examples by each poet of their work in the haibun, or poetic prose form, and included informal notes to the poems. This is a useful and inspiring addition to the Essential Poets series.