I love all of Altman’s books, but I think this is my favorite. Her childhood couldn’t be more different than mine, but I can relate to her search for acceptance and belonging in a family where both those things were elusive, and family tensions simmered and boiled over.
From the Washington Post columnist and James Beard Award-winning author of Poor Man’s Feast comes a story of seeking truth, acceptance, and self in a world of contradiction...
Treyf: According to Leviticus, unkosher and prohibited, like lobster, shrimp, pork, fish without scales, the mixing of meat and dairy. Also, imperfect, intolerable, offensive, undesirable, unclean, improper, broken, forbidden, illicit.
Fans of Augusten Burroughs and Jo Ann Beard will enjoy this kaleidoscopic, universal memoir in which Elissa Altman explores the tradition, religion, family expectations, and the forbidden that were the fixed points in her Queens, New York, childhood. Every part of Altman’s…
2016 Reprint of 1957 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. This charming story is drawn from the true adventures of Sarton's own cat, and recounts his evolution from a stray to a gentleman cat, and finally, his emergence as a Fur Person. "A Fur Person is a cat who had decided to stay with people as long as he lives. This can only happen if a human being has imagined a part of himself into a cat just as the cat has imagined part of himself into a human being." Illustrated by Barbara…
I read this beautiful book straight through last fall, and then I immediately began to read it again. I treat myself to a single entry every Sunday. Margaret Renkl's lyrical prose opens my eyes to aspects of the natural world right in my own backyard. And Billy Renkl's beautiful collages are a visual feast.
From New York Times opinion writer and bestselling author Margaret Renkl comes a “howling love letter to the world” (Ann Patchett): a luminous book tracing the passing of seasons, personal and natural.
In The Comfort of Crows, Margaret Renkl presents a devotional of sorts: fifty-two essays that follow the creatures and plants in her backyard over the course of a year. As we move through the seasons—from a crow spied on New Year’s Day, its resourcefulness and sense of community setting a theme for the year—what develops is a portrait of joy and grief. Joy at the ongoing pleasures of…
Rare glimpses into the hardscrabble lives of rural Southern women and a model for oral history practice
"It was hard times," French Carpenter Clark recalls, a sentiment unanimously echoed by the sixteen other women who talk about their lives in Country Women Cope with Hard Times. Born between 1890 and 1940 in eastern Tennessee and western South Carolina, these women grew up on farms, in labor camps, and in remote towns during an era when the region's agricultural system changed dramatically. As daughters and wives, they milked cows, raised livestock, planted and harvested crops, worked in textile mills, sold butter and eggs, preserved food, made cloth, sewed clothes, and practiced remarkable resourcefulness. Their recollections paint a vivid picture of rural life in the first half of the twentieth century for a class of women underrepresented in historical accounts.
Through her edited interviews with these women, Melissa Walker provides firsthand descriptions of the influence of modernization on ordinary people struggling through the agricultural depression of the 1920s and 1930s and its aftermath. Their oral histories make plain the challenges such women faced and the self-sacrificing ways they found to confront hardship. While the women detail the difficulties of their existence―the drought years, early freezes, low crop prices, and tenant farming―they also recall the good times and the neighborly assistance of well-developed mutual aid networks, of which women were the primary participants.
