After the Tears: Helping Adult Children of Alcoholics Heal Their Childhood Trauma


Jane Middelton-Moz - 1986
    The trauma and grief of childhood losses affect every aspect of the life of an adult child of an alcoholic (ACoA). Now the authors of the bestselling After the Tears offer further insight into the origin and cost of childhood pain for those who grew up in alcoholic families. In this revised and expanded edition, Jane Middelton-Moz and Lorie Dwinell combine their years of experience in working with ACoAs, tackling issues such as intimacy, sibling relationships, codependency, breaking the alcoholic pattern, building a relationship with the inner child, forgiveness, and opening a window to spirituality.

Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking


Nathalie Dupree - 2012
    From basics such as cleaning vegetables and scrubbing a country ham, to show-off skills like making a soufflé and turningout the perfect biscuit—all are explained and pictured with clarity and plenty of stories that entertain. Traditional Southern recipes and ingredients are also given modern twists to make them relevant for today’s healthy lifestyle.With more than 750 recipes and 650 variations, making a perfect piecrust, a heavenly biscuit, mouthwatering vegetables, or crispy fried chicken is attainable for any home cook. The recipes and directions are easily accessible to kitchen novices as well as seasoned cooks-there is plenty here for everyone.

Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting


Jennifer Traig - 2019
    The result is Act Natural, hilarious and deft dissection of the history of Western parenting, written with the signature biting wit and deep insights Traig has become known for.Moving from ancient Rome to Puritan New England to the Dr. Spock craze of mid-century America, Traig cheerfully explores historic and present-day parenting techniques ranging from the misguided, to the nonsensical, to the truly horrifying. Be it childbirth, breastfeeding, or the ways in which we teach children how to sleep, walk, eat, and talk, she leaves no stone unturned in her quest for answers: Have our techniques actually evolved into something better? Or are we still just scrambling in the dark?

Food to Live By: The Earthbound Farm Organic Cookbook


Myra Goodman - 2006
    It’s synonymous with premium quality, delicious flavor, conscientious farming, and optimum health. It’s what we need to feed our kids, it’s what we deserve to feed ourselves. And thanks in part to Myra Goodman, co-owner and cofounder of Earthbound Farm with her husband, Drew, organic food is now available just about anywhere fresh food is sold, becoming more mainstream every day. Not only has Myra been growing organic food for over twenty years, she has been cooking with it, too. In Food to Live By she combines her twin food passions, serving up hundreds of recipes, ideas, shopping and cooking tips, health notes, and more. Illustrating the book are full-color photographs throughout that bring readers right into the breathtaking California sunshine. This is perfect cooking for friends and family, packed with irresistible dishes for weeknight dinners and casual entertaining, festive breakfasts and fall picnics. Recipes are all about the ingredients and their intrinsic qualities, not fancy techniques or time-consuming steps. Marry chicken with three simple accompaniments— rosemary, lemons, and garlic—and it’s transformed. Heighten the flavor of a springtime fava bean and orzo salad with an unexpected fava bean “pesto.” Combine Meyer lemon juice and soy sauce to create a marinade, tenderizer, and sauce that results in a perfect grilled flank steak. Food to Live By also includes a wealth of information about organic farming and how to make the wisest food choices; there are full-color Field Guides—to gourmet greens, apples, heirloom tomatoes, winter squash—and Farm Fresh ingredient guides to sorrel, corn, melons, avocados, organic poultry, asparagus, artichokes, ginger, and more, featuring what to look for plus care and handling. The book is a boon to food lovers.

A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There


Aldo Leopold - 1949
    As the forerunner of such important books as Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, and Robert Finch's The Primal Place, this classic work remains as relevant today as it was sixty-five years ago.

Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1: Guiding Principles to Welcome Rain Into Your Life and Landscape


Brad Lancaster - 2019
    This book enables you to assess your on-site resources, gives you a diverse array of strategies to maximize their potential, and empowers you with guiding principles to create an integrated, multi-functional plan specific to your site and needs. Clearly written with more than 290 illustrations, this full-color edition helps bring your site to life, reduce your cost of living, endow yourself and your community with skills of self-reliance and cooperation, and create living air conditioners of vegetation growing beauty, food, and wildlife habitat. Stories of people who are successfully welcoming rain into their life and landscape will invite you to do the same.

On Trails: An Exploration


Robert Moor - 2016
    He learned the tricks of master trail-builders, hunted down long-lost Cherokee trails, and traced the origins of our road networks and the Internet. In each chapter, Moor interweaves his adventures with findings from science, history, philosophy, and nature writing—combining the nomadic joys of Peter Matthiessen with the eclectic wisdom of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.Throughout, Moor reveals how this single topic—the oft-overlooked trail—sheds new light on a wealth of age-old questions: How does order emerge out of chaos? How did animals first crawl forth from the seas and spread across continents? How has humanity’s relationship with nature and technology shaped world around us? And, ultimately, how does each of us pick a path through life?Moor has the essayist’s gift for making new connections, the adventurer’s love for paths untaken, and the philosopher’s knack for asking big questions. With a breathtaking arc that spans from the dawn of animal life to the digital era, On Trails is a book that makes us see our world, our history, our species, and our ways of life anew.

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth


R. Buckminster Fuller - 1969
    Fuller expresses what may well be his penultimate view of the human condition. Here, in a mood at once philosophical and involved, Mr. Fuller traces man's intellectual evolution and weighs his capability for survival on this magnificent craft, this Spaceship Earth, this superbly designed sphere of almost negligible dimension in the great vastness of space.Mr. Fuller is optimistic that man will survive and, through research and development and increased industrialization, generate wealth so rapidly that he can do very great things. But, he notes, there must be an enormous educational task successfully accomplished right now to convert man's tendency toward oblivion into a realization of his potential, to a universe-exploring advantage from this Spaceship Earth.It has been noted that Mr. Fuller spins ideas in clusters, and clusters of his ideas generate still other clusters. The concept spaceship earth is Mr. Fuller's, and though used by Barbara Ward as the title of a work of her own the idea was acknowledged by her there as deriving from Mr. Fuller. The brilliant syntheses of some fundamental Fuller principles given here makes of this book a microcosm of the Fuller system.

Forests: The Shadow of Civilization


Robert Pogue Harrison - 1992
    Consistently insightful and beautifully written, this work is especially compelling at a time when the forest, as a source of wonder, respect, and meaning, disappears daily from the earth."Forests is one of the most remarkable essays on the human place in nature I have ever read, and belongs on the small shelf that includes Raymond Williams' masterpiece, The Country and the City. Elegantly conceived, beautifully written, and powerfully argued, [Forests] is a model of scholarship at its passionate best. No one who cares about cultural history, about the human place in nature, or about the future of our earthly home, should miss it.—William Cronon, Yale Review"Forests is, among other things, a work of scholarship, and one of immense value . . . one that we have needed. It can be read and reread, added to and commented on for some time to come."—John Haines, The New York Times Book Review

Great Tide Rising: Towards Clarity and Moral Courage in a time of Planetary Change


Kathleen Dean Moore - 2016
    Even as seas rise against the shores, another great tide is beginning to rise – a tide of outrage against the pillage of the planet, a tide of commitment to justice and human rights, a swelling affirmation of moral responsibility to the future and to Earth’s fullness of life.Philosopher and nature essayist Kathleen Dean Moore takes on the essential questions: Why is it wrong to wreck the world? What is our obligation to the future? What is the transformative power of moral resolve? How can clear thinking stand against the lies and illogic that batter the chances for positive change? What are useful answers to the recurring questions of a storm-threatened time – What can anyone do? Is there any hope? And always this: What stories and ideas will lift people who deeply care, inspiring them to move forward with clarity and moral courage?

The G Ring: How the IUD Escaped the Nazis


Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow - 2020
    Ernst Gräfenberg was among the most sought-after gynecologists in pre-World War II Germany. The creator of the first IUD, known as the Gräfenberg ring, he was posthumously credited with identifying the eponymous "Gräfenberg spot" or G-spot. He was also a Jew in Nazi Germany, and by 1938 he had been stripped of his practice, his possessions, and his freedom and was languishing in a Nazi prison. After being allegedly ransomed from confinement by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, Gräfenberg fled to America, where he eventually became the only male doctor at Sanger's birth control clinic.In this bracing essay, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow rescues from near obscurity the pioneering inventor of a contraceptive device that unleashed decades of controversy. And as we see efforts to roll back reproductive rights, it is also a cautionary tale as relevant today as it was nearly a century ago.RUNNING TIME ➼ 1hr. and 9mins.©2020 Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow (P)2019 Brilliance, Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Mind Over Back Pain: A Radically New Approach to the Diagnosis and Treatment of Back Pain


John E. Sarno - 1982
     Dr. John Sarno's revolutionary approach to back pain is based on his discovery that tension is the underlying cause of most back problems--leading to an often unrecognized condition called Tension Mytosis Syndrome. In this book--the first to explain the psychophysiology, manifestations, and treatment of TMS--you'll find clear steps, sensible advice, and simple illustrations to help you find relief, prevent future pain...and live life fully once again.

The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers, and Foodies Are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet


Kristin Ohlson - 2014
    That carbon is now floating in the atmosphere, and even if we stopped using fossil fuels today, it would continue warming the planet. In The Soil Will Save Us, journalist and bestselling author Kristin Ohlson makes an elegantly argued, passionate case for "our great green hope"—a way in which we can not only heal the land but also turn atmospheric carbon into beneficial soil carbon—and potentially reverse global warming.As the granddaughter of farmers and the daughter of avid gardeners, Ohlson has long had an appreciation for the soil. A chance conversation with a local chef led her to the crossroads of science, farming, food, and environmentalism and the discovery of the only significant way to remove carbon dioxide from the air—an ecological approach that tends not only to plants and animals but also to the vast population of underground microorganisms that fix carbon in the soil. Ohlson introduces the visionaries—scientists, farmers, ranchers, and landscapers—who are figuring out in the lab and on the ground how to build healthy soil, which solves myriad problems: drought, erosion, air and water pollution, and food quality, as well as climate change. Her discoveries and vivid storytelling will revolutionize the way we think about our food, our landscapes, our plants, and our relationship to Earth.

One Square Inch of Silence: One Man's Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World


Gordon Hempton - 2009
    Natural silence is our nation’s fastest-disappearing resource, warns Emmy-winning acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, who has made it his mission to record and preserve it in all its variety—before these soul-soothing terrestrial soundscapes vanish completely in the ever-rising din of man-made noise. Recalling the great works on nature written by John Muir, John McPhee, and Peter Matthiessen, this beautifully written narrative, co-authored with John Grossmann, is also a quintessentially American story—a road trip across the continent from west to east in a 1964 VW bus. But no one has crossed America like this. Armed with his recording equipment and a decibel-measuring sound-level meter, Hempton bends an inquisitive and loving ear to the varied natural voices of the American landscape—bugling elk, trilling thrushes, and drumming, endangered prairie chickens. He is an equally patient and perceptive listener when talking with people he meets on his journey about the importance of quiet in their lives. By the time he reaches his destination, Washington, D.C., where he meets with federal officials to press his case for natural silence preservation, Hempton has produced a historic and unforgettable sonic record of America. With the incisiveness of Jack Kerouac’s observations on the road and the stirring wisdom of Robert Pirsig repairing an aging vehicle and his life, One Square Inch of Silence provides a moving call to action. More than simply a book, it is an actual place, too, located in one of America’s last naturally quiet places, in Olympic National Park in Washington State.

Clipping Through: One Mad Week In Video Games


Leigh Alexander - 2014
    The veteran game journalist takes you inside the curious experience of life and work in video games -- through the lens of one week spent at the incredible Game Developers Conference.Available in epub, mobi (kindle compatible), microsoft word, and pdf formats.