Paths of Desire: The Passions of a Suburban Gardener
Dominique Browning - 2004
Paths of Desire is the enchanting, amusing, and moving account of making a garden -- and confronting the essence of suburban gardening, with its idiosyncratic ecosystem. This meant struggling with depraved skunks and raccoons, marauding teenagers, plastic jungle gyms, toppling garbage cans, uncontrollable eyesores, potholed drives, and all the grinding, honking, and buzzing of the neighborhood. Browning's delightfully frank prose conveys the very sense of being deep in a garden, with all its organic smells and textures, and the myriad joys of deciding what to plant and watching as the vision is realized. It contains a rich store of advice and illustrative anecdotes for enthusiasts and novices alike, as Browning amusingly documents the missteps she took in the planning of her garden and the satisfactions of finally getting it right. In Paths of Desire she teaches us how to embrace our plots of land -- no matter their size, beauty, or proximity to the city -- and make them our own. But she also reminds us that the life of a garden can never be separated from the people who wander in and out of it: characters like the charming but useless children; the philosophical tree doctor and the band of Helpful Men; the neighbors -- legalistic on one side, aesthetically challenged on the other -- and, best and worst of all, the True Love. By the end of the book, Browning has transformed her garden -- and her life -- and has created a place of enchantment, which is most of all what a garden should be.
Madness: A Bipolar Life
Marya Hornbacher - 2008
At age twenty-four, Hornbacher was diagnosed with Type I rapid-cycle bipolar, the most severe form of bipolar disorder.In Madness, in her trademark wry and utterly self-revealing voice, Hornbacher tells her new story. Through scenes of astonishing visceral and emotional power, she takes us inside her own desperate attempts to counteract violently careening mood swings by self-starvation, substance abuse, numbing sex, and self-mutilation. How Hornbacher fights her way up from a madness that all but destroys her, and what it is like to live in a difficult and sometimes beautiful life and marriage -- where bipolar always beckons -- is at the center of this brave and heart-stopping memoir.Madness delivers the revelation that Hornbacher is not alone: millions of people in America today are struggling with a variety of disorders that may disguise their bipolar disease. And Hornbacher's fiercely self-aware portrait of her own bipolar as early as age four will powerfully change, too, the current debate on whether bipolar in children actually exists.Ten years after Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind, this storm of a memoir will revolutionize our understanding of bipolar disorder.
Cognitive Processing Therapy for PTSD: A Comprehensive Manual
Patricia A. Resick - 2016
Written by the treatment's developers, the book includes session-by-session guidelines for implementation, complete with extensive sample dialogues and 40 reproducible client handouts. It explains the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of CPT and discusses how to adapt the approach for specific populations, such as combat veterans, sexual assault survivors, and culturally diverse clients. The large-size format facilitates photocopying and day-to-day use. Purchasers also get access to a Web page where they can download and print the reproducible materials. CPT is endorsed by the U.S. Departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense, the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies, and the U.K. National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) as a best practice for the treatment of PTSD.
Grow in the Dark: How to Choose and Care for Low-Light Houseplants
Lisa Eldred Steinkopf - 2019
Author Lisa Eldred-Steinkopf, known as the Houseplant Guru, shares the knowledge she’s gained tending to her own personal jungle of over 1,000 houseplants. Having a south-facing window doesn’t always guarantee you the best light to grow plants—especially if your window faces an alley or a tree-lined street. What’s the point of growing an urban jungle if tall buildings are blocking all your sunshine? This compact guide, designed to look as good on your shelf as it is useful, will help you learn how to make the most of your light so you can reap the physical and emotional benefits of living with plants. Detailed profiles include tips on watering your plants just right, properly potting them, and troubleshooting pests and diseases. You’ll also learn which plants are safe to keep around your pets. Whether you live in a shady top-floor apartment or a dungeon-y garden level, this book will help you grow your plant collection to its healthiest for its Instagram debut.
Paradise Under Glass: An Amateur Creates a Conservatory Garden
Ruth Kassinger - 2008
Ruth Kassinger’s wonderful story of the unique way she chose to cope with the profound changes in her life—a book that will delight readers of Eat, Pray, Love and I Feel Bad About My Neck—is interwoven with the fascinating history of conservatories from the Renaissance orangeries to the glass palaces of Kew.
Gardenlust: A Botanical Tour of the World’s Best New Gardens
Christopher Woods - 2018
In this sumptuous global tour of modern gardens, intrepid plant expert Christopher Woods spotlights 50 gardens that push boundaries and define natural beauty in significant ways. Featuring both private and public gardens, this journey makes its way from the Americas and Europe to Australia and New Zealand, with stops in Asia, Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula. Along the way, you'll learn about the people, plants, and stories that make these iconic gardens so lust-worthy. As inspiring as it is insightful, Gardenlust will delight your passion for garden inspiration—and the many places it grows.
Narrative Therapy
Stephen Madigan - 2010
This therapeutic theory is founded on the idea that people have many interacting narratives that go into making up their sense of who they are, and that the issues they bring to therapy are not restricted to (or sited within) the clients themselves, but rather are influenced and shaped by cultural discourses about identity and power.
The Essential Earthman: Henry Mitchell on Gardening
Henry Mitchell - 1981
He has tried and failed, persevered and triumphed, and he has many sound recommendations for us fumblers and failures." --Celestine Sibley, in the Atlanta Constitution."Henry Mitchell is one of America's most entertaining and enlightening garden writers.... 'Garden writer' fails, in truth, to describe this man. He gardens and he writes--the former, if we take him at his word, with lust and loathing, foolhardiness and finesse; the latter with gentle irony and consummate skill." --Pacific Horticulture"Mitchell mixes practical advice, encouragement, philosophic consolation and wit. He is the neighbor you wish you could talk to over the back fence." --House and GardenHenry Mitchell was to gardening what Izaak Walton was to fishing. The Essential Earthman is a collection of the best of his long-running column for the Washington Post. Although he offered invaluable tips for novice as well as seasoned gardeners, at the heart of his essays were piquant observations: on keeping records; the role of trees in gardens (they don't belong there); how a gardener should weather the winter; on shrubs, bulbs, and fragrant flowers--and about observation itself. Here's one example: Marigolds gain enormously in impact when used as sparingly as ultimatums. Henry Mitchell came to his subject with reverence, passion, humor, and a contagious enthusiasm tempered only by his sober knowledge of human frailty. The Essential Earthman is for all who love gardening--even those who only dream of doing it.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
Lori Gottlieb - 2019
One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose office she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but. As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients' lives -- a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a twenty-something who can't stop hooking up with the wrong guys -- she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to Wendell. With startling wisdom and humor, Gottlieb invites us into her world as both clinician and patient, examining the truths and fictions we tell ourselves and others as we teeter on the tightrope between love and desire, meaning and mortality, guilt and redemption, terror and courage, hope and change.Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is revolutionary in its candor, offering a deeply personal yet universal tour of our hearts and minds and providing the rarest of gifts: a boldly revealing portrait of what it means to be human, and a disarmingly funny and illuminating account of our own mysterious lives and our power to transform them.
The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind, Survive Everyday Parenting Struggles, and Help Your Family Thrive
Daniel J. Siegel - 2011
Your preschooler refuses to get dressed. Your fifth-grader sulks on the bench instead of playing on the field. Do children conspire to make their parents’ lives endlessly challenging? No—it’s just their developing brain calling the shots!In this pioneering, practical book, Daniel J. Siegel, neuropsychiatrist and author of the bestselling Mindsight, and parenting expert Tina Payne Bryson demystify the meltdowns and aggravation, explaining the new science of how a child’s brain is wired and how it matures. The “upstairs brain,” which makes decisions and balances emotions, is under construction until the mid-twenties. And especially in young children, the right brain and its emotions tend to rule over the logic of the left brain. No wonder kids can seem—and feel—so out of control. By applying these discoveries to everyday parenting, you can turn any outburst, argument, or fear into a chance to integrate your child’s brain and foster vital growth. Raise calmer, happier children using twelve key strategies, including • Name It to Tame It: Corral raging right-brain behavior through left-brain storytelling, appealing to the left brain’s affinity for words and reasoning to calm emotional storms and bodily tension.• Engage, Don’t Enrage: Keep your child thinking and listening, instead of purely reacting.• Move It or Lose It: Use physical activities to shift your child’s emotional state.• Let the Clouds of Emotion Roll By: Guide your children when they are stuck on a negative emotion, and help them understand that feelings come and go.• SIFT: Help children pay attention to the Sensations, Images, Feelings, and Thoughts within them so that they can make better decisions and be more flexible.• Connect Through Conflict: Use discord to encourage empathy and greater social success. Complete with clear explanations, age-appropriate strategies for dealing with day-to-day struggles, and illustrations that will help you explain these concepts to your child, The Whole-Brain Child shows you how to cultivate healthy emotional and intellectual development so that your children can lead balanced, meaningful, and connected lives.
The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music
Steve López - 2008
At first, he is drawn by the opportunity to crank out another column for the Los Angeles Times, just one more item on an ever-growing to-do list: "Violin Man." But what Lopez begins to unearth about the mysterious street musician leaves an indelible impression." "More than thirty years earlier, Ayers had been a promising classical bass student at Juilliard - ambitious, charming, and one of the few African-Americans - until he gradually lost his ability to function, overcome by a mental breakdown. When Lopez finds him, Ayers is alone, suspicious of everyone, and deeply troubled, but glimmers of that brilliance are still there." From an impromptu concert of Beethoven's Eighth in the Second Street tunnel to a performance of Bach's Unaccompanied Cello Suites on Skid Row, the two men learn to communicate through Ayers's music. The Soloist is a story about unwavering commitment, artistic devotion, and the transformative magic of music.
Grow Fruit
Alan Buckingham - 2010
And few things taste more delicious than fruit picked straight from the tree or bush and eaten when perfectly ripe, perhaps still warm from the sun. This is fruit the way nature intended, not fruit that has been flown in from hundreds or thousands of miles away or stored in climate-controlled warehouses before being sealed in plastic for supermarket shelves. What could be fresher, tastier, more local, and more seasonal than fruit you've grown yourself, in your own garden or allotment, picked at just the moment when it's at its most perfect?This book shows just how easy it is to grow your own fruit. You don't need a huge garden or a dedicated orchard. It's possible to get a perfectly good harvest from plants grown in containers on balconies or patios and from even the smallest of town gardens. Pick the right varieties for the conditions you've got, invest in a bit of planning and preparation, follow the instructions contained in these pages, and you can be harvesting and eating your own strawberries, plums, pears, apricots, blackberries, redcurrants, melons, and figs.
The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves
Stephen Grosz - 2012
These beautifully rendered tales illuminate the fundamental pathways of life from birth to death.A woman finds herself daydreaming as she returns home from a business trip; a young man loses his wallet. We learn, too, from more extreme examples: the patient who points an unloaded gun at a police officer, the compulsive liar who convinces his wife he's dying of cancer. The stories invite compassionate understanding, suggesting answers to the questions that compel and disturb us most about love and loss, parents and children, work and change. The resulting journey will spark new ideas about who we are and why we do what we do.
The Complete ACOA Sourcebook: Adult Children of Alcoholics at Home, at Work and in Love
Janet Geringer Woititz - 2002
Their message today is as profound and timeless as it was two decades ago. Now, in this complete collection, readers will learn again the insight and healing power of Janet Wotitiz's words. The Complete ACoA Sourcebook is a compilation of three of Dr. Woititz's classic books, addressing head-on the symptoms of The Adult Children of Alcoholics syndrome and providing strategies for living a normal life as an adult. Readers will find help for themselves: at home, in intimate relationships and on the job. They will discover the reasons for the way they think, believe and feel about themselves; ACoAs often feel isolated, have difficulty in relationships, in the workplace and in feeling good about themselves. Readers who are familiar with Woititz's work will find wisdom once again in this classic collection. Those new to ACoA will gain fresh insight into their behavior patterns and find an avenue for self-love and healing. Noted ACoA expert Dr. Robert Ackerman, author of the best-selling Perfect Daughters and Silent Sons, provides a foreword and explains why Janet Woititz's message will continue to help millions of readers for generations to come.
Re-Visioning Family Therapy: Race, Culture, and Gender in Clinical Practice
Monica McGoldrick - 1998
Editor Monica McGoldrick¿whose earlier Ethnicity and Family Therapy provides in-depth portraits of the family systems of more than 40 ethnic groups¿here takes up vital cultural issues that cut across all ethnicities. Renowned contributors offer concrete suggestions for improving family therapy training and developing services that minority families may experience as more relevant to their lives.