Whatever You Are, Be a Good One


Lisa Congdon - 2014
    Readers will find enlightening insights ("Wisdom begins in wonder"— Socrates), stirring calls to action ("Leap and the net will appear"—John Burroughs), and stimulating encouragements ("Be curious, not judgmental"—Walt Whitman) beautifully illuminated on every page. A delightful reminder to get out there and make the most of life, Whatever You Are, Be a Good One is perfect for recent graduates, creative thinkers, and anyone looking for a little inspiration.

The Interior Design Handbook: Furnish, Decorate, and Style Your Space


Frida Ramstedt - 2019
    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.

How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built


Stewart Brand - 1994
    How Buildings Learn is a masterful new synthesis that proposes that buildings adapt best when constantly refined and reshaped by their occupants, and that architects can mature from being artists of space to becoming artists of time. From the connected farmhouses of New England to I.M. Pei's Media Lab, from "satisficing" to "form follows funding," from the evolution of bungalows to the invention of Santa Fe Style, from Low Road military surplus buildings to a High Road English classic like Chatsworth—this is a far-ranging survey of unexplored essential territory.More than any other human artifacts, buildings improve with time—if they're allowed to. How Buildings Learn shows how to work with time rather than against it.

The Kinfolk Home: Interiors for Slow Living


Kinfolk Magazine - 2015
    In this much-anticipated follow-up, Kinfolk founder Nathan Williams showcases how embracing that same ethos—of slowing down, simplifying your life, and cultivating community—allows you to create a more considered, beautiful, and intimate living space.  The Kinfolk Home takes readers inside 35 homes around the world, from the United States, Scandinavia, Japan, and beyond. Some have constructed modern urban homes from blueprints, while others nurture their home’s long history. What all of these spaces have in common is that they’ve been put together carefully, slowly, and with great intention. Featuring inviting photographs and insightful profiles, interviews, and essays, each home tour is guaranteed to inspire.

How One of You Can Bring the Two of You Together


Susan Page - 1997
    Based on the premise that what you do in a relationship makes changes faster than anything you discuss, Page introduces the concept of "Loving Leadership" and offers fourteen empowering and doable strategies for recapturing the positive feelings, including how to:Overcome resentment and move beyond blameSolve major problems--one at a timeRecapture lost intimacyStep-by-step, Page demonstrates that with tangible goals, and new ways of thinking, one partner can bring new levels of harmony and love to a relationship.

Found Style: Vintage Ideas for Modern Living


David Butler - 2003
    Unique style comes with successfully blending the old and new, the unexpected with the familiar - a white antique stove and modern chrome refrigerator placed side by side, or a 50s kidney-shaped coffee table accented by an Adirondack chair. Enter Found Style, the modern-day guide to the mix-and-match aesthetic. From vintage treasures to contemporary furnishings, family heirlooms to flea market finds, authors David and Amy Butler take a friendly approach to creating spaces that are courageously unique - and undeniably stylish. Illustrated with 200 inspiring color photographs, Found Style offers up a host of innovative ideas, as well as tips for honing one's flea market savvy, and blending old and new with unexpected dash. Found Style is a celebration of creating eclectic personal style and a resource for those who live for the hunt.

I Love Macarons


Hisako Ogita - 2009
    But the secrets of making perfect macarons have long eluded home bakersuntil now! In I Love Macarons, renowned Japanese pastry-maker Hisako Ogita brings her extensive experience to the art of baking macarons with fully illustrated foolproof step-by-step instructions. This charmingly designed guide is sure to have pastry lovers everywhere whipping up these colorful confections at home, using ordinary baking equipment and simple ingredients to create myriad flavors of perfection.

Yum-Yum Bento Box: Fresh Recipes for Adorable Lunches


Crystal Watanabe - 2010
    With Yum-Yum Bento Box, Crystal Watanabe and Maki Ogawa devote an entire cookbook to these delicious and adorable meals for all ages! Learn how to craft your favorite foods into a variety of shapes—from caterpillars, cars, and puppy dogs to pretty flowers, princesses, and kitty cats.  Yum-Yum Bento Box features chapters on Cuties & Critters, Fairy-Tale Friends, and Special Day Treats, plus a handy shopping guide, easy recipes for mini snacks, general tips and tricks, and so much more. Stop wasting money on pre-packaged lunches—and start making beautiful, healthy bentos!

Unstuff Your Life!: Kick the Clutter Habit and Completely Organize Your Life for Good


Andrew Mellen - 2010
    Mellen has created unique, lasting techniques for streamlined living, bringing order out of chaos for the chronically overwhelmed everywhere. Acknowledging that it's often the "stuff behind the stuff" that holds people back, Mellen offers a surprisingly simple, yet effective solution in his step-by-step guide, guaranteed to help achieve organizational bliss for everyone from perpetual key misplacers to hard-core hoarders.From basement to bedroom, kitchen to car, and into every corner of life, Mellen’s system yields lasting results. Discover how to:Never lose your keys or wallet again Stop mail, magazine, and paper pileups for good Feel empowered to tackle bills and budgets Reclaim space and time once dominated by clutter Built on the principle that we must distinguish ourselves from our possessions, Unstuff Your Life! starts with truly achievable goals and works toward the nightmare projects everyone tries hard to avoid. With humor, honesty, tough love, and foolproof advice, Mellen makes it easy to finally let go and embrace the decluttered life.

You Are Your Own Gym: The Bible of Bodyweight Exercises for Men and Women


Mark Lauren - 2010
    Providing the most effective, efficient, inexpensive, and convenient routine for exercise available, this simple program requires no gym or weights—only the human body. For thousands of years—from Ancient Greece’s Olympic athletes to tomorrow’s U.S. Special Forces—humanity’s greatest physical specimens have not relied on fitness centers or dumbbells, but have rather utilized their own bodies as the most advanced fitness machines ever created. These 107 exercises are presented in a clear, concise, and complete manner for men and women of all athletic ability levels.

How to Build a Fire: And Other Handy Things Your Grandfather Knew


Erin Bried - 2010
    Courageous, responsible, and involved, they understand sacrifice, hard work, and how to do whatever is necessary to take care of their loved ones. They also know how to have a rollicking good time.Sensible, fun, and inspiring, How to Build a Fire offers a rare glimpse into the hearts and minds of grandfathers near and far by sharing their practical skills and sweet stories on how to be stronger, smarter, richer, and happier. Inside are more than one hundred essential step-by-step tips for fixing, leading, prospering, playing, and hosting, including how to   • buck up and be brave in the face of adversity • play hard and break in a baseball mitt • bait a hook and catch a big fish • look dapper and tie a perfect tie • get a raise and earn more • write a love letter and kindle romance • change a flat tire and save the day • stand up and give a sparkling toast • play the harmonica and make your own music   Loaded with charming illustrations, good humor, and warm nostalgia, How to Build a Fire is the perfect handbook for guys or gals of any age. The first of its kind, this collection of our grandfathers’ hard-earned wisdom will help you build confidence and get back to what’s really important in life.

Less: Minimalism, For Real


Rose Lounsbury - 2017
    Based on her own life-changing experiment of “going minimalist,” Rose provides a realistic guide to reducing your excess stuff and reclaiming your hard-earned free time. Less offers attainable steps that you can take to achieve the clutter-free, functional home you crave. Through candid stories from her life as a minimalist blogger-turned-businesswoman, Rose will inspire you to stop spending your time dealing with your stuff and start living a better life with less.

Wellness Warrior: Fighting for Life in Fabulous Shoes


Lisa Douthit - 2015
    . . multiple times. After surviving four different cancers, she hit the final wall when a life-threatening autoimmune disease took over. Exhausted and discouraged, she had to make a choice: was she going to give in to disease and let nature take its course, or would she use whatever strength she had left to figure out what the hell was happening to her…and more importantly, WHY? After immersing herself in the study of illness from a physical, emotional, and spiritual perspective, Lisa learned how to recreate her body from the cellular level while keeping her sense of humor. Throughout her crazy journey, she shares practical skills and a quirky higher guidance to create positive shifts in our health which will serve as a roadmap through the darkest hours of life. It’s time to take our lives back from disease. With every purchase of this book, you can donate a copy to someone struggling with a chronic illness. Simply go to LisaDouthit.com/WarriorBook to learn how you can help someone be well without having perfect health. Alone we are strong, but together we are invincible. Help others become warriors too. Join the tribe.

The Works: Anatomy of a City


Kate Ascher - 2005
    When you flick on your light switch the light goes on--how? When you put out your garbage, where does it go? When you flush your toilet, what happens to the waste? How does water get from a reservoir in the mountains to your city faucet? How do flowers get to your corner store from Holland, or bananas get there from Ecuador? Who is operating the traffic lights all over the city? And what in the world is that steam coming out from underneath the potholes on the street? Across the city lies a series of extraordinarily complex and interconnected systems. Often invisible, and wholly taken for granted, these are the systems that make urban life possible. The Works: Anatomy of a City offers a cross section of this hidden infrastructure, using beautiful, innovative graphic images combined with short, clear text explanations to answer all the questions about the way things work in a modern city. It describes the technologies that keep the city functioning, as well as the people who support them-the pilots that bring the ships in over the Narrows sandbar, the sandhogs who are currently digging the third water tunnel under Manhattan, the television engineer who scales the Empire State Building's antenna for routine maintenance, the electrical wizards who maintain the century-old system that delivers power to subways. Did you know that the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is so long, and its towers are so high, that the builders had to take the curvature of the earth's surface into account when designing it? Did you know that the George Washington Bridge takes in approximately $1 million per day in tolls? Did you know that retired subway cars travel by barge to the mid-Atlantic, where they are dumped overboard to form natural reefs for fish? Or that if the telecom cables under New York were strung end to end, they would reach from the earth to the sun? While the book uses New York as its example, it has relevance well beyond that city's boundaries as the systems that make New York a functioning metropolis are similar to those that keep the bright lights burning in big cities everywhere. The Works is for anyone who has ever stopped midcrosswalk, looked at the rapidly moving metropolis around them, and wondered, how does this all work?

Living On Almost Nothing


Amber Storck - 2021