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"A short, accessible set of prose observations about nature, place, and time, arranged (like Local Wonders) according to the calendar year"-- "Ted Kooser sees a writer's workbooks as the stepping-stones on which a poet makes his way across the stream of experience toward a poem. Because those wobbly stones are only inches above the quotidian rush, what's jotted there has an immediacy that is intimate and close to life. Kooser, winner of the Pultizer Prize and a former U.S. poet laureate, has filled scores of workbooks. The Wheeling Year offers a sequence of contemplative prose observations about nature, place, and time arranged according to the calendar year. Written by one of America's most beloved poets, this book is published in the year in which Kooser turns seventy-five, with sixty years of workbooks stretching behind him. "--
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"Phoning Home is a collection of entertaining and thought-provoking essays featuring the author's quirky family, his Jewish heritage, and his New York City upbringing. Jacob M. Appel's recollections and insights, informed and filtered by his advanced degrees in medicine, law, and ethics, not only inspire nostalgic feelings but also offer insight into contemporary medical and ethical issues. At times sardonic and at others self-deprecating, Appel lays bare the most private aspects of his emotional life. "We'd just visited my grandaunt in Miami Beach, the last time we would ever see her. I had my two travel companions, Fat and Thin, securely buckled into the backseat of my mother's foul-tempered Dodge Dart," writes Appel of his family vacation with his two favorite rubber cat toys. Shortly thereafter Fat and Thin were lost forever--beginning, when Appel was just six years old, what he calls his "private apocalypse." Both erudite and full-hearted, Appel recounts storylines ranging from a bout of unrequited love gone awry to the poignant romance of his grandparents. We learn of the crank phone calls he made to his own family, the conspicuous absence of Jell-O at his grandaunt's house, and family secrets long believed buried. The stories capture the author's distinctive voice--a blend of a physician's compassion and an ethicist's constant questioning. "--
LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays. --- BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. --- Bioethicists --- Lawyers --- Physicians --- Ethicists --- Appel, Jacob M., --- Family.
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"With the discipline of a surgeon performing a critical operation, acclaimed storyteller Harry Mark Petrakis strips away layers of his nine decades of life to expose the blood and bone of a human being in his third memoir and twenty-fifth book, Song of My Life. Petrakis is unsparing in exposing his own flaws, from a youthful gambling addiction, to the enormous lie of his military draft, to a midlife suicidal depression. Yet he is compassionate in depicting the foibles of others around him. Petrakis writes with love about his parents and five siblings, with nostalgia as he describes the Greek neighborhoods and cramped Chicago apartments of his childhood, and with deep affection for his wife and sons as he recalls with candor, comedy, and charity a writer's long, fully-lived life. Petrakis recounts the near-fatal childhood illness, which confined him to bed for two years and, through hours of reading during the day and night, nurtured his imagination and compulsion toward storytelling. A high school dropout, Petrakis also recalls his work journey in the steel mills, railroad depots, and shabby diners of the city. There is farce and comedy in the pages as he describes the intricate framework of lies that drove his courtship of Diana, who has been his wife of sixty-nine loving years. Petrakis shares his struggles for over a decade to write and publish and finally, poignantly describes the matchless instant when he holds his first published book in his hands. The chapters on his experiences in Hollywood where he had gone to write the screenplay of his best-selling novel A Dream of Kings are as revealing of the machinations and egos of moviemaking as any Oliver Stone documentary. Petrakis's individual story, as fraught with drama and revelation as the adventures of Odysseus, comes to an elegiac conclusion when, at the age of ninety, he ruminates on his life and its approaching end. With a profound and searing honesty, this self-exploration of a solitary writer's life helps us understand our own existences and the tapestry of lives connecting us together in our shared human journey. "--
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"In Class Not Dismissed, award-winning professor Anthony Aveni tells the personal story of his six decades in college classrooms and some of the 10,000 students who have filled them. Through anecdotes of his own triumphs and tribulations--some amusing, others heartrending--Aveni reveals his teaching story and thoughts on the future of higher education. Although in recent years the lecture has come under fire as a pedagogical method, Aveni ardently defends lecturing to students. He shares his secrets on crafting an engaging lecture and creating productive dialogue in class discussions. He lays out his rules on classroom discipline and tells how he promotes the lost art of listening. He is a passionate proponent of the liberal arts and core course requirements as well as a believer in sound teaching promoted by active scholarship. Aveni is known to his students as a consummate storyteller. In Class Not Dismissed he shares real stories about everyday college life that shed light on serious educational issues. The result is a humorous, reflective, inviting, and powerful inquiry into higher education that will be of interest to anyone invested in the current and future state of college and university education. "--
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. --- EDUCATION / Higher. --- Undergraduates. --- Lecture method in teaching. --- College teaching. --- Education, Humanistic. --- Education, Liberal --- Humanistic education --- Liberal arts education --- Liberal education --- Education --- Classical education --- University teaching --- Teaching --- Lectures and lecturing --- Undergraduate college students --- Undergraduate students --- College students --- Higher education --- Postsecondary education --- Universities and colleges
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"Ladette Randolph understands her life best through the houses she has inhabited. From the isolated farmhouse of her childhood, to the series of houses her family occupied in small towns across Nebraska as her father pursued his dream of becoming a minister, to the equally small houses she lived in as a single mother and graduate student, houses have shaped her understanding of her place in the world and served as touchstones for a life marked by both constancy and endless cycles of change. On September 12, 2001, Randolph and her husband bought a dilapidated farmhouse on twenty acres outside Lincoln, Nebraska, and set about gutting and rebuilding the house themselves. They had nine months to complete the work. The project, undertaken at a time of national unrest and uncertainty, led Randolph to reflect on the houses of her past and the stages of her life that played out in each, both painful and joyful. As the couple struggles to bring the dilapidated house back to life, Randolph simultaneously traces the contours of a life deeply shaped by the Nebraska plains, where her family has lived for generations, and how those roots helped her find the strength to overcome devastating losses as a young adult. Weaving together strands of departures and arrivals, new houses and deep roots, cycles of change and the cycles of the seasons, Leaving the Pink House is a richly layered and compelling memoir of the meaning of home and family, and how they can never really leave us, even if we leave them"--
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. --- Women authors, American --- Families --- Home --- Dwellings --- Farmhouses --- Farm houses --- Farm buildings --- Domiciles --- Homes --- Houses --- One-family houses --- Residences --- Residential buildings --- Single-family homes --- Buildings --- Architecture, Domestic --- House-raising parties --- Household ecology --- Housing --- Psychological aspects. --- History. --- Conservation and restoration --- Psychology --- Randolph, Ladette --- Family. --- Childhood and youth. --- Homes and haunts --- Lincoln Region (Neb.)
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"Living simply isn't always simple. When Alan Boye first lived in sustainable housing, he was young, idealistic, and not much susceptible to compromise--until rattlesnakes, black widow spiders, and loneliness drove him out of the utilities-free yurt he'd built in New Mexico. Thirty-five years later, he decided to try again. This time, with an idealism tempered by experience and practical considerations, Boye and his wife constructed an off-the-grid, energy-efficient, straw bale house in Vermont. Sustainable Compromises chronicles these two remarkable attempts to live simply in two disparate American eras. Writing with hard-won authority and humor, Boye takes up the 'how-to' practicalities of 'building green,' from finances to nuts and bolts to strains on friends and family. With Walden as a historical and philosophical touchstone and his own experience as a practical guide, he also explores the ethical and environmental concerns that have framed such undertakings from Thoreau's day to our own. A firsthand account of the pleasures and pitfalls of living simply, his book is a deeply informed and engaging reflection on what sustainability really means--in personal, communal, ethical, and environmental terms"-- "An account of Boye's experiences building and occupying alternative, sustainable houses"--
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. --- NATURE / Environmental Conservation & Protection. --- Sustainability --- Ecological houses --- Sustainable living --- Sustainability science --- Human ecology --- Social ecology --- Alternative homes --- Ecohomes --- Environmental homes --- Green homes (Green technology) --- Low impact houses --- Sustainable houses --- Dwellings --- Sustainable buildings --- Ecological living --- Green living --- Living, Sustainable --- Alternative lifestyles --- Environmentalism --- Green movement --- Philosophy. --- Design and construction. --- Boye, Alan, --- Homes and haunts
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"What should by now be a familiar, if always disturbing event in American history--the internment of Japanese American citizens and aliens during World War II--is given an original treatment in this creative memoir. Lily Havey was ten years old when her family of four was uprooted and sent first to Santa Anita Assembly Center in southern California and subsequently for the duration of the war to the Amache (or Granada) internment camp in southeastern Colorado. She experienced removal and confinement as a pubescent young woman and with a distinctly individual perspective. She was an independent and, in her own and apparently her parents' view, difficult child. Her mother called her a gasa gasa girl, meaning wiggly, restless, unable to sit still. The interment put additional stress on the dysfunctional marriage of her parents and especially on her father, who had a particularly hard time coping. Lily Havey's recounting of that time is in turn wrenching, funny, touching, and biting but consistently informative and engrossing, especially with regard to the daily challenges of life and the internees' adaptations"--
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. --- HISTORY / Military / World War II. --- HISTORY / United States / State & Local / West (AK, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT, NV, UT, WY). --- Japanese American women --- Japanese Americans --- World War, 1939-1945 --- European War, 1939-1945 --- Second World War, 1939-1945 --- World War 2, 1939-1945 --- World War II, 1939-1945 --- World War Two, 1939-1945 --- WW II (World War, 1939-1945) --- WWII (World War, 1939-1945) --- History, Modern --- Evacuation and relocation of Japanese Americans, 1942-1945 --- Internment of Japanese Americans, 1942-1945 --- Relocation of Japanese Americans, 1942-1945 --- Women, Japanese American --- Women --- Concentration camps --- Evacuation and relocation, 1942-1945. --- Evacuation of civilians --- Havey, Lily Yuriko Nakai, --- Nakai, Lily Yuriko, --- Nakai, Yuriko, --- Childhood and youth. --- Granada Relocation Center --- United States. --- Amache Relocation Camp --- Camp Amache --- Granada War Relocation Center --- History. --- Forced removal of Japanese Americans, 1942-1945 --- Evacuation and relocation, 1942-1945 --- Forced removal of civilians --- Forced removal and internment, 1942-1945.
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