A delightful tour through the intimate details of life in Victorian England, told by a historian who has cheerfully endured them all.
Ruth Goodman believes in getting her hands dirty. Drawing on her own adventures living in re-created Victorian conditions, Goodman serves as our bustling and fanciful guide to nineteenth-century life. Proceeding from daybreak to bedtime, this charming, illustrative work celebrates the ordinary lives of the most perennially fascinating era of British history. From waking up to the rapping of a “knocker-upper man” on the window pane to lacing into a corset after a round of calisthenics,
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Dan Harris always believed the restless, relentless, impossible-to-satisfy voice in his head was one of his greatest assets. How else can you climb the ladder in an ultra-competitive field like TV news except through nonstop hand-wringing and hypervigilance? For a while, his strategy worked. Harris anchored national broadcasts, he covered wars. Then he hit the skids, entering a downward slide that culminated in a televised panic attack in front of an audience of millions.
What happened next was completely unforeseen. Through a bizarre series of events — involving a disgraced evangelical pastor, a mysterious self-help guru and a fateful gift from his wife —
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A true story of a unique friendship between two people who had nothing—and ultimately everything—in common.
Carol Wall, living in a lily-white neighborhood in Middle America, is at a crossroads in her life. Her children are grown; she has successfully overcome illness; her beloved parents are getting older. One day she notices a dark-skinned African man tending her neighbor’s yard. His name is Giles Owita. He bags groceries at the supermarket. He comes from Kenya. And he’s very good at gardening.
Before long Giles is transforming not only Carol’s yard, but her life. Though they are seemingly quite different,
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A mid-century doctor's raw, unvarnished account of his own descent into madness, and his daughter's attempt to piece his life back together and make sense of her own.
Texas-born and Harvard-educated, Dr. Perry Baird was a rising medical star in the late 1920s and 1930s. Early in his career, ahead of his time, he grew fascinated with identifying the biochemical root of manic depression, just as he began to suffer from it himself. By the time the results of his groundbreaking experiments were published, Dr. Baird had been institutionalized multiple times,
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A child of the Rhodesian wars and daughter of two deeply complicated parents, Alexandra Fuller is no stranger to pain. But the disintegration of Fuller’s own marriage leaves her shattered. Looking to pick up the pieces of her life, she finally confronts the tough questions about her past, about the American man she married, and about the family she left behind in Africa. A breathtaking achievement, Leaving Before the Rains Come is a memoir of such grace and intelligence, filled with such wit and courage, that it could only have been written by Alexandra Fuller.
Leaving Before the Rains Come begins with the dreadful first years of the American financial crisis when Fuller’s delicate balance—between American pragmatism and African fatalism,
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A groundbreaking health guide for women of all ages that shows women’s inherent moodiness is a strength, not a weakness, and medication is not always the answer.
Women are leaders, breadwinners, and caregivers. We’re leaning in so much we’re about to fall over. To take the edge off, many women pop a pill, eat something sugary, have a drink, or spend mindless time online. These activities quickly become patterns that take an enormous toll on women’s bodies and natural hormonal balance.
Women are made to be moody and, according to Dr. Holland, that’s a strength—not a weakness.
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