It details pivotal moments in Mrs. Roberts' intriguing life, revealing how faith in God has given her strength and hope. Good Morning America viewers have come to know and love Lucimarian Tolliver Roberts. For many, the heartfelt connection began the day after Hurricane Katrina blew through the Gulf Coast. They watched as Robin stood among the remnants of her hometown and talked about her desperate search for her elderly mother, who had ridden out the storm in her Mississippi home.Robin writes, "Folks are drawn to Mom's humility, wisdom, and spirituality." Reflections from Robin on her mother's life and faith cap each chapter."God has brought the most wonderful and sometimes the most unlikely people, of all ages and races, into my life to encourage and guide me on this spiritual journey of life," Mrs. Roberts says with bright eyes.

    But can you make that trendy new lamp jibe with your grandmother's heirloom dresser?The fabulous Beekman Boys answer with a resounding "Yes!" in their new book, Beekman 1802 Style. Through more than 200 stunning photographs from Country Living magazine and never-before-seen images of the Beekman farmhouse, the boys use their city-turned-country-boy charm and style to help with all things home. Their unique home design tips and tricks for mixing high and low, East and West, indoors and outdoors, and traditional with modern will help you create a home that is inviting, warm, and--perhaps most important--fabulous.

    To the Western mind these fearsome warriors-samurai, the masterless ronin, and the assassin ninja-have always been a source of mystery and wonder, combining the idealism of chivalry with military fanaticism. The Ways Of The Samurai digs beneath the myth and reveals a truth even more amazing about the men who practiced a discipline drawn from Zen and Confucian ethics-bushido, the way of the warrior.

    From the time his father told him as a child that 'he would enjoy his rugby more if he got fitter', Richard Hugh McCaw never looked back.Captain of the All Blacks since 2006, he is the face of rugby in New Zealand and one of our best known and most admired figures.

    Secrest had unprecedented access to an archive of over one hundred thousand of Wright's letters, photographs, drawings, and books. She also interviewed surviving devotees, students, and relatives. The result is an explicit portrait of both the genius architect and the provocative con-man."Secrest seizes the themes most evocative of certain of our cultural myths, forging them into a coherent and emotionally plausible narrative."—New Republic"An engaging narrative."—New York Times Book Review"The real triumph of this biography . . . is the link it makes between Frank Lloyd Wright's personal life and his architecture."—The Economist"Secrest's achievement is to etch Wright's character in sharp relief. . . . [She] presents Wright in his every guise."-Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune"An extremely engaging profile."—The Philadelphia Inquirer"A spellbinding portrait."—Library Journal"The best [biography] so far, a huge and definitive accumulation of fact."—Time

    Smiles of recognition turn into grins of enthusiasm as more people discover them and dream about making their own private retreats or family play spaces. And it's nice to remind ourselves that treehouses are built into the oldest and most forgiving, living things on earth. Also, history records treehouses as being built as deliberate follies, as challenges for arboreal designers, for merrymaking, and for keeping the spirit of fairy tales alive. But treehouses can also be social places. We will visit many that were built to entertain, to hang out with friends, or as guest houses. Trees welcome all types. Master treehouse builders Peter and Judy Nelson, with David Larkin, have embarked on yet another treehouse-discovery expedition across America, this time adding the investigation of backyard playhouses to their agenda. Now, in The Treehouse Book, they reveal their findings, illustrated and described in the most complete volume yet. From casual treeshacks made from discarded lumber to multitiered feats of fancy, they found shelters representing myriad builders-interesting characters ranging from childhood fanatics grown up, to weekend carpenters, to those who want their grandkids to have the best clubhouse on the block. Detailed how-to information, including plans and drawings, is woven with behind-the-scenes tales of each structure's occupants and stunning interior and exterior photographic explorations.

    Here is a clear and enthusiastic introduction to buildings methods from ancient times to the present day, including recent advances in science and technology that have had important effects on the planning and construction of buildings: improved materials (steel, concrete, plastics), progress in antiseismic designs, and the revolutionary changes in both architectural and structural design made possible by the computer.

    From that exhilarating portrait, he takes us back more than two thousand years to the city's foundation, one mired in mythologies and superstitions that would inform Rome's development for centuries.From the beginning, Rome was a hotbed of power, overweening ambition, desire, political genius, and corruption. Hughes details the turbulent years that saw the formation of empire and the establishment of the sociopolitical system, along the way providing colorful portraits of all the major figures, both political (Julius Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, Nero, Caligula) and cultural (Cicero, Martial, Virgil), to name just a few. For almost a thousand years, Rome would remain the most politically important, richest, and largest city in the Western world.From the formation of empire, Hughes moves on to the rise of early Christianity, his own antipathy toward religion providing rich and lively context for the brutality of the early Church, and eventually the Crusades. The brutality had the desired effect—the Church consolidated and outlasted the power of empire, and Rome would be the capital of the Papal States until its annexation into the newly united kingdom of Italy in 1870.As one would expect, Hughes lavishes plenty of critical attention on the Renaissance, providing a full survey of the architecture, painting, and sculpture that blossomed in Rome over the course of the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, and shedding new light on old masters in the process. Having established itself as the artistic and spiritual center of the world, Rome in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries saw artists (and, eventually, wealthy tourists) from all over Europe converging on the bustling city, even while it was caught up in the nationalistic turmoils of the Italian independence struggle and war against France.Hughes keeps the momentum going right into the twentieth century, when Rome witnessed the rise and fall of Italian Fascism and Mussolini, and took on yet another identity in the postwar years as the fashionable city of "La Dolce Vita." This is the Rome Hughes himself first encountered, and it's one he contends, perhaps controversially, has been lost in the half century since, as the cult of mass tourism has slowly ruined the dazzling city he loved so much. Equal parts idolizing, blasphemous, outraged, and awestruck, Rome is a portrait of the Eternal City as only Robert Hughes could paint it.

    . .thoughtful, beautiful, and enlightening...” —Jane Jacobs   “This book will have a lasting infl uence on the future quality of public open spaces. By helping us better understand the larger public life of cities, Life between Buildings can only move us toward more lively and healthy public places. Buy this book, fi nd a comfortable place to sit in a public park or plaza, begin reading, look around. You will be surprised at how you will start to see (and design) the world differently.” —Landscape Architecture

    The development of interpretive modes of various stripes--post-structuralist, Marxian, phenomenological, psychoanalytic, as well as others dissenting or eccentric--has given scholars a range of tools for rethinking architecture in relation to other fields and for reasserting architectures general importance in intellectual discourse.This anthology presents forty-seven of the primary texts of architecture theory, introducing each with an explication of the concepts and categories necessary for its understanding and evaluation. It also presents twelve documents of projects or events that had major theoretical repercussions for the period. Several of the essays appear here in English for the first time.ContributorsDiana Agrest, Stanford Anderson, Archizoom, George Baird, Jennifer Bloomer, Massimo Cacciari, Jean-Louis Cohen, Beatriz Colomina, Alan Colquhoun, Maurice Culot, Jacques Derrida, Ignasi de Sol�-Morales, Peter Eisenman, Robin Evans, Michel Foucault, Kenneth Frampton, Mario Gandelsonas, Frank Gehry, J�rgen Habermas, John Hejduk, Denis Hollier, Bernard Huet, Catherine Ingraham, Fredric Jameson, Charles A. Jencks, Jeffrey Kipnis, Fred Koetter, Rem Koolhaas, Leon Krier, Sanford Kwinter, Henri Lefebvre, Daniel Libeskind, Mary McLeod, Alberto P�rez-G�mez, Jos� Quetglas, Aldo Rossi, Colin Rowe, Massimo Scolari, Denise Scott Brown, Robert Segrest, Jorge Silvetti, Robert Somol, Martin Steinmann, Robert A. M. Stern, James Stirling, Manfredo Tafuri, Georges Teyssot, Bernard Tschumi, Anthony Vidler, Paul Virilio, Mark Wigley

    Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

    James Wines puts up the various - and often irreconcilable - concepts of environmentally-friendly architecture for discussion, making a case for an architecture that not only focuses on technological solutions, but also tries to reconcile man and nature in its formal idiom. Among the examples of contemporary ecological architecture presented are works by Emilio Ambasz, Gustav Peichl, Arthur Quarmby, Jean Nouvel, Sim Van der Ryn, Jourda and Perraudin, Log ID, James Cutler, Stanley Saitowitz, Fran ois Roche, Nigel Coates and Michael Sorkin.

    Frankie’s father finds work in a bustling cotton mill, but erupting labor strikes threaten to dismantle the town’s socioeconomic structure. Frankie soon befriends two charismatic young men—Winslow Curtis, privileged son of the town’s most powerful politician, and Joe Barros, a Portuguese mill worker who becomes a union organizer—forming a tender yet bittersweet love triangle that will have an impact on all three throughout their lives. Inspired in part by Chace’s family history, Frankie’s journey to adulthood takes us through the First World War and into the Jazz Age, followed by the Great Depression—from rags to riches and back again. Her life parallels the evolution of the mill town itself, and the lost promise of a boomtown that everyone thought would last forever.Of her acclaimed novel Capture the Flag, the Los Angeles Times said, "Chace’s writing resembles a generation of New York writers heavily influenced by John Updike: Rick Moody, A. M. Homes, Susan Minot, and, more recently, Melissa Bank." With its lyrical prose and compelling style, Leaving Rock Harbor further establishes Chace’s position in that literary tradition.

    Head of Map Collections at the British Library, Peter Barber has here compiled an historic and lavish atlas, charting the progress of civilization as our knowledge of the world expanded. Simply organized as a progression through time, The Map Book collects some 175 maps that span four millennia - from the famed prehistoric Bedolina (Italy) incision in rock from around 1500 B.C. to the most modern, digitally enhanced rendering. Many of the maos are beautiful works of art in their own right. From Europe to the Americas, Africa to Asia, north to south, there are maps of oceans and continents charted by heroic adventurers sailing into the unknown, as accounts spread of new discoveries, shadowy continents begin to appear n the margins of the world, often labeled 'unknown lands.' Other maps had a more practical use: some demarcated national boundaries or individual plots of land; military plans depicted enemy positions; propaganda treatises showed one country or faction at an advantage over others.So much history resides in each map--cultural, mythological, navigational--expressing the unlimited extent of human imagination. This is captured in the accompanying texts--mini essays by leading map historians--that are as vivid and insightful as the maps themselves. They make The Map Book as much a volume to be read as to be visually admired.

    Mixing realism and abstraction, Bacon delves deep beneath the surfaces of things, opening up the human body to reveal the chaos that lies within and struggling with all that is inexplicable. Erotic and grotesquely beautiful is the work of this legendary painter whose haunting, distorted figures have inspired entire generations of painters who seek to emulate his highly original style.