Book picks similar to
Down to Earth: A Guide to Simple Living by Rhonda Hetzel


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Shalom in the Home: Smart Advice for a Peaceful Life


Shmuley Boteach - 2007
    Influenced by his own experience as a child of divorce, the host of the TLC series Shalom in the Home gets to the heart of family dynamics and individual personalities to help families build deeper, more loving relationships. His insights and encouragements help you cope with all the most common domestic issues: relationships, parenting, in-laws, neighbors and more. aI'm here to inspire people to be good people first, a good couple second, and good parents third, a says Shmuley. He illustrates how families can strengthen their bonds with unforgettable stories of families in crisis who undergo intensive counseling to improve their relationships and bring peace, or ashalom, a to their homes.

Eleven Bats: A Story of Cricket and the SAS


Anthony 'Harry' Moffitt - 2020
    An improvised game of cricket was often the circuit-breaker Harry and his team needed after the tension of operations. He began a tradition of organising matches wherever he was sent, whether it was in the mountains of East Timor with a fugitive rebel leader, or on the dusty streets of Baghdad, or in exposed Forward Operating Bases in the hills of Afghanistan. Soldiers, locals and even visiting politicians played in these spontaneous yet often bridge-building games.As part of the tradition, Harry also started to take a cricket bat with him on operational tours, eleven of them in total. They'd often go outside the wire with him and end up signed by those he met or fought alongside. These eleven bats form the basis for Harry's extraordinary memoir. It's a book about combat, and what it takes to serve in one of the world's most elite formations. It's a book about the toll that war takes on soldiers and their loved ones. And it's a book about the healing power of cricket, and how a game can break down borders in even the most desperate of circumstances.

Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System


Raj Patel - 2007
    It took him from the colossal supermarkets of California to India’s wrecked paddy-fields and Africa’s bankrupt coffee farms, while along the way he ate genetically engineered soy beans and dodged flying objects in the protestor-packed streets of South Korea.What he found was shocking, from the false choices given us by supermarkets to a global epidemic of farmer suicides, and real reasons for famine in Asia and Africa.Yet he also found great cause for hope—in international resistance movements working to create a more democratic, sustainable and joyful food system. Going beyond ethical consumerism, Patel explains, from seed to store to plate, the steps to regain control of the global food economy, stop the exploitation of both farmers and consumers, and rebalance global sustenance.

Whiskey Words & a Shovel III


R.H. Sin - 2017
    Sin completes the trilogy withWhiskey Words & a Shovel III!His raw voice delivers gritty, impassioned truths on matters of loving, living, and leaving in this final book in the series. r.h. Sin s final volume in the Whiskey, Words, and a Shovel series expands on the passion and vigor of his first two installments. His stanzas inspire strength through the raw, emotional energy and the vulnerability of his poems. Relationships, love, pain, and fortitude are powerfully rendered in his poetry, and his message of perseverance in the face of emotional turmoil cuts to the heart of modern-day life. At roughly 300 pages, this culminating volume will be his lengthiest yet."

The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth


Tim Flannery - 2001
    Over the past decade, the world has seen the most powerful El Ni�o ever recorded, the most devastating hurricane in two hundred years, the hottest European summer on record, and one of the worst storm seasons ever experienced in Florida. With one out of every five living things on this planet committed to extinction by the levels of greenhouse gases that will accumulate in the next few decades, we are reaching a global climatic tipping point. The Weather Makers is both an urgent warning and a call to arms, outlining the history of climate change, how it will unfold over the next century, and what we can do to prevent a cataclysmic future. Along with a riveting history of climate change, Tim Flannery offers specific suggestions for action for both lawmakers and individuals, from investing in renewable power sources like wind, solar, and geothermal energy, to offering an action plan with steps each and every one of us can take right now to reduce deadly CO2 emissions by as much as 70 percent.

The Dark Between Stars


Atticus Poetry - 2018
    In his second collection of poetry, The Dark Between Stars, he turns his attention to the dualities of our lived experiences—the inescapable connections between our highest highs and lowest lows. He captures the infectious energy of starting a relationship, the tumultuous realities of commitment, and the agonizing nostalgia of being alone again. While grappling with the question of how to live with purpose and find meaning in the journey, these poems offer both honest explorations of loneliness and our search for connection, as well as light-hearted, humorous observations. As Atticus writes poignantly about dancing, Paris, jazz clubs, sunsets, sharing a bottle of wine on the river, rainy days, creating, and destroying, he illustrates that we need moments of both beauty and pain—the darkness and the stars—to fully appreciate all that life and love have to offer.

Allez Allez Allez: The Inside Story of the Resurgence of Liverpool FC, Champions of Europe 2019


Simon Hughes - 2019
    He takes them to Chapel Street, where the club’s business is determined, and to America, where it is owned. He takes them into Anfield, where many of the most important moments are defined, and he takes them on to the pitches of the Premier League and the Champions League, as we revisit how Liverpool stormed their way to the top of the Premier League this season.

The Middle Ages


Edwin S. Grosvenor - 2016
    Once seen as a thousand years of warfare, religious infighting, and cultural stagnation, they are now understood to be the vital connection between the past and the present. Along with the battles that helped shape the modern world are a rich heritage of architecture, arts, and literature, of empire and its dissolution. It was the era of the Crusades and the Norman Conquest, the Black Death and the fall of Constantinople. It is a landscape both familiar and foreign, dark and foreboding at times, but also filled with the promise and potential of the future.

Tony Bourdain Boxset - Kitchen Confidential & Medium Raw


Anthony Bourdain - 2010
    Medium Raw explores these changes, moving back and forth from the author's bad old days to the present. Tracking his own strange and unexpected voyage from journeyman cook to globe-travelling professional eater and drinker, Bourdain compares and contrasts what he's seen and what he's seeing, pausing along the way for a series of confessions, rants, investigations, and interrogations of some of the most controversial figures in food. And always he returns to the question: 'Why cook?' Or the harder one to answer: 'Why cook well?' Beginning with a secret and highly illegal after-hours gathering of powerful chefs he compares to a Mafia summit, Bourdain, in his distinctive, no-holds-barred style, cuts to the bone on every subject he tackles.

Gangsters of Shanghai


Gerry O'Sullivan - 2013
    Seek this superbly researched and deftly written novel out"Review By Peter Desmond'City Weekend' Magazine, Shanghai 10 December 2013The severed head in the bamboo birdcage swayed above the teeming marketplace. It told Constable Mike Gallagher everything he needed to know about Shanghai.It’s 1927. The son of a rural Irish cop, Gallagher joins the Shanghai Municipal Police. to escape an Ireland crippled by its recent bitter independence fight, and to trace the aristocratic woman whose memory still haunts him. They would venture together to China, Fiona once promised. Then the IRA torched her family estate. Everybody believes she died there. Everybody but Mike Gallagher.Shanghai. Pearl of the East or Whore of the Orient? Depends on who you ask. It’s a cesspool of poverty, thronged with refugees, gripped by civil war. But for some it’s still a fever dream: jazz clubs and opium dens, celebrities and spies, easy money and easier women. Gallagher encounters the city’s biggest philanthropist, a man called Big Ears Lu – who is also its creepiest racketeer. He falls for the beautiful courtesan Miriam Tsai. But does his collusion with Lu keep her trapped in the House of Multiple Joys? Shanghai in 1927 is a city where after dark anything seems possible. A city where anyone can be crushed, and anyone corrupted. Even an innocent Irish cop.From the wreckage of guerrilla war in Ireland to the dawn of world war in Asia, the international mystery thriller Gangsters of Shanghai seethes with 20th Century turbulence and temptation. Can Mike Gallagher escape the imploding city with his life, his self-respect – and the answer to Fiona’s fate? About The Author Of Gangsters Of Shanghai, The International Mystery Thriller.Gerry O'Sullivan was born in Limerick, Ireland in 1961, where he indulged his taste for historical fiction, intelligent action thrillers and men’s adventure books. A graduate of the University of Limerick, he moved to Australia in 1986 and worked in the international education sector. Gerry was inspired to write this action mystery by his granduncle, a Detective Inspector in the Shanghai Municipal Police during the 1920’s. Spellbound by old photographs and family lore, Gerry resolved to write an action adventure thriller with the accuracy of historical fiction. Gerry travelled to Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Brandeis University, Boston where the top-secret files of the Shanghai Municipal Police Special Branch are kept on microfilm (they were smuggled out of Shanghai by the CIA in 1949).Gerry then moved to Singapore to immerse himself in the atmosphere of a fast paced English-speaking Asian city, as Shanghai was in the 1920’s and 1930’s. To achieve the pulse-quickening features of an action mystery with the demandingly accurate details of historical fiction, Gerry blended his granduncle’s stories about his Shanghai police work, years of scholarly research, and his own experiences of the city.

Dress Code: The Naked Truth About Fashion


Mari Grinde Arntzen - 2014
    In this book, Mari Grinde Arntzen asks how and why this is—how can fashion simultaneously attract us to its glamour and repel us with its superficiality and how being called “fashionable” can be at once a compliment and an insult. Arntzen guides us through the major figures and brands of today’s fashion industry, showing how they shape us and in turn why we love to be shaped by them. She examines both everyday, affordable “fast fashion” brands, as well as the luxury market, to show how fashion commands a powerful influence on every socioeconomic level of our society. Stepping into our closets with us, she thinks about what happens when we get dressed: why fashion can make us feel powerful, beautiful, and original at the same time that it forces us into conformity. Stripping off the layers of the world’s fifth largest industry, garment by garment, she holds fashion up as a phenomenon, business, and art, exploring the questions it forces us to ask about the body, image, celebrity, and self-obsession. Ultimately, Arntzen asks the most direct question: what is fashion? How has it taken such a powerful hold on the world, forever propelling us toward its concepts of beauty?

No Safe Spaces


Dennis Prager - 2019
    Students lashing out at any speaker brave enough to say something they disagree with. Precious snow flakes demanding “Safe Spaces” to protect them from any idea they haven’t heard from their liberal professors. In this book and the accompanying movie, Dennis Prager, Mark Joseph, and Adam Carolla expose the attack on free speech and free thought. It began in the universities, but—fair warning—it’s coming to your neighborhood and your workplace. “No Safe Spaces is a film every American should see. I could barely move when it was over. Powerful, emotional, and a call to action for anyone worried about the intellectual fascism happening in this country. A brave, timely, and important film.” —MEGYN KELLY, former FOX News anchor and host of Megyn Kelly Today “There is no free speech in America for free thinkers! You can have free speech in America but only if you say what everybody else agrees with. It’s not enough to ‘live and let live’ now. The psycho-elite believe ‘silence is violence’ and you must actively promote what THEY want no matter how vile or reprehensible it is to you. George Orwell lives! They should’ve called Orwell ‘Nostradamus’ because his most frightening prophecies have come to pass, as you will witness in No Safe Spaces!” —MANCOW MULLER, radio phenomenon “An excellent film, the best I’ve seen on the subject of free speech. I especially like Dennis’s line, ‘They have to believe we are evil; otherwise they’d have to debate us.’ Perfect!” —CAL THOMAS, America’s #1 syndicated columnist

Rick Steves' Pocket London


Rick Steves - 2011
    Everything a busy traveler needs is easy to access: a neighborhood overview, city walks and tours, sights, handy food and accommodations charts, an appendix packed with information on trip planning and practicalities, and a fold-out city map.Included in Rick Steves' Pocket London—Sights: the National Portrait Gallery, Courtauld Gallery, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Bankside WalkWalks and Tours: the Westminster Walk, Westminster Abbey Tour, National Gallery Tour, West End Walk, British Museum Tour, British Library Tour, The City Walk, St. Paul’s Cathedral Tour, and Tower of London Tour

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All


Michael Shellenberger - 2020
    He helped save the world’s last unprotected redwoods. He co-created the predecessor to today’s Green New Deal. And he led a successful effort by climate scientists and activists to keep nuclear plants operating, preventing a spike of emissions.But in 2019, as some claimed “billions of people are going to die,” contributing to rising anxiety, including among adolescents, Shellenberger decided that, as a lifelong environmental activist, leading energy expert, and father of a teenage daughter, he needed to speak out to separate science from fiction.Despite decades of news media attention, many remain ignorant of basic facts. Carbon emissions peaked and have been declining in most developed nations for over a decade. Deaths from extreme weather, even in poor nations, declined 80 percent over the last four decades. And the risk of Earth warming to very high temperatures is increasingly unlikely thanks to slowing population growth and abundant natural gas.Curiously, the people who are the most alarmist about the problems also tend to oppose the obvious solutions.What’s really behind the rise of apocalyptic environmentalism? There are powerful financial interests. There are desires for status and power. But most of all there is a desire among supposedly secular people for transcendence. This spiritual impulse can be natural and healthy. But in preaching fear without love, and guilt without redemption, the new religion is failing to satisfy our deepest psychological and existential needs.

The Wine Trials


Robin Goldstein - 2008
    Acclaimed Fearless Critic Robin Goldstein has gone around the country serving 6,000 glasses of wine from brown paper bags to experts and everyday wine drinkers around America. Here, in print for the first time, are the shocking results, including full-page reviews of the 100 wines that beat $50 to $150 bottles in the blind tastings.