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Occasionally life becomes poetry. Award winning science writer and translator, Wallace Kaufman, takes a clear-eyed, sometimes humorous, always honest view of his life on several continents, in big cities and remote wild places, in the Russian arctic and Latin American jungles. He says he has "dined at the smorgasbord of life", and here is a recap in lively prose, pictures, and verse.
The survivor of two suicide attempts begins a quest to understand her family's curse of depression, as well as its many gifts and rumored nobility. The story begins with her girlhood in Roslyn Village on Long Island but as her son takes up her unfinished work, it leads him to the Scottish border and back to the Jewish ghettos and villages of Bohemia, and finally forward to descendants on five continents.
A beautifully written, unsentimental account that challenges our Thoreauvian romance with nature and offers the conclusion that in civilization is the preservation of the wildness that we cherish.
Our beaches are eroding, sinking, washing out right under our houses, hotels, bridges; vacation dreamlands become nightmare scenes of futile revetments, fills, groins, what have you—all thrown up in a frantic defense against the natural system. The romantic desire to live on the seashore is in doomed conflict with an age-old pattern of beach migration. Yet it need not be so. Conservationist Wallace Kaufman teams up with marine geologist Orrin H. Pilkey Jr., in an evaluation of America's beaches from coast to coast, giving sound advice on how to judge a safe beach development from a dangerous one and how to live at the shore sensibly and safely.
When the back-to-the-land movement burst in on rural Chatham County, North Carolina in the 1960s it shocked, scandalized, galvanized and irrevocably changed the world of red clay farms, tobacco lands, segregation, and 'yellow dog Democrats.' In How Simple Is Life Wallace Kaufman tells how he became "the mayor of Hippie Town," built his own small home deep in the forest, almost blew himself up, broke his back, and began to read lessons in the land around him like a book.He and his daughter learn surprising lessons not only about nature but about people whose hopes, like his own, blossomed in those woods, then died. If Henry David Thoreau had marched to his different drummer in the woods of North Carolina instead of at Walden Pond 170 years ago , and if he had gone to live in the woods for 25 years instead of two, instead of becoming the posthumous champion of the "simple life," he might have asked, "How simple is life?"Wallace Kaufman's report of life in and around his forest brings you not only sharp, original and unsentimental insights into the wild world, but a cast of characters from the dim past to the high tech present who will forever enrich your sense of time and place.
100 years after nurse Wallace "Buster" Pickering died citizens of the late 21st century in the town of Plainfield, New Hampshire will find their village can now use the fund he left at his death to relieve their misfortunes and send poor children to college. The humble man who ran away from immigrant parents as a teenager became a nurse to the richest people in America. He could choose his future. He chose a young woman from a New Hampshire village, followed her home, and there they stayed the rest of their lives. His love for her became his love for her hometown, and for its future. This is the story of love and its best consequences.
Identify and understand the plants that are changing the North American landscape forever.
The craze in positive thinking that swept American culture thanks to celebrity endorsements from such popular figures as Oprah Winfrey comes from the page to the screen with The Secret. Derived from a tradition said to date back hundreds of years, the philosophy of The Secret is believed to help people reach their goals and lead happier lives, with a technique for thinking and doing that's been employed by some of history's most accomplished people. ~ Cammila Collar, Rovi