A marriage of convenience leads to a life of passion and purpose. A shared vision transforms the American landscape forever. New York, 1858: Mary, a young widow with three children, agrees to marry her brother-in-law Frederick Law Olmsted, who is acting on his late brother's deathbed plea to "not let Mary suffer." But she craves more than a marriage of convenience and sets out to win her husband's love. Beginning with Central Park in New York City, Mary joins Fred on his quest to create a 'beating green heart' in the center of every urban space. Over the next 40 years, Fred is inspired to create dozens of city parks, private estates and public spaces with Mary at his side. Based upon real people and true events, this is the story of Mary's journey and personal growth and the challenges inherent in loving a brilliant and ambitious man.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Power couple Marlo Thomas and Phil Donahue have created a compelling and intimate collection of intriguing conversations with famous couples about their enduring marriages and how they have made them last through the challenges we all share. What makes a marriage last? Who doesn’t want to know the answer to that question? To unlock this mystery, iconic couple Marlo Thomas and Phil Donahue crisscrossed the country and conducted intimate conversations with forty celebrated couples whose long marriages they’ve admired—from award-winning actors, athletes, and newsmakers to writers, comedians, musicians, and a former U.S. president and First Lady. Through these conversations, Marlo and Phil also revealed the rich journey of their own marriage. What Makes a MarriageLast offers practical and heartfelt wisdom for couples of all ages, and a rare glimpse into the lives of husbands and wives we have come to know and love. Marlo and Phil’s frequently funny, often touching, and always engaging conversations span the marital landscape—from that first rush of new love to keeping that precious spark alive, from navigating hard times to celebrating triumphs, from balancing work and play and family to growing better and stronger together. At once intimate, candid, revelatory, hilarious, instructive, and poignant, this book is a beautiful gift for couples of every age and stage. Featuring interviews with: Alan and Arlene Alda • Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick President Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter • James Carville and Mary Matalin Deepak and Rita Chopra • Patricia Cornwell and Staci Gruber Bryan Cranston and Robin Dearden • Billy and Janice Crystal Jamie Lee Curtis and Christopher Guest • Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen Viola Davis and Julius Tennon • Gloria and Emilio Estefan Michael J. Fox and Tracy Pollan • Chip and Joanna Gaines Sanjay and Rebecca Gupta • Mariska Hargitay and Peter Hermann Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka • Ron and Cheryl Howard Jesse and Jacqueline Jackson • Elton John and David Furnish John and Justine Leguizamo • LL COOL J and Simone I. Smith Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone • John McEnroe and Patty Smyth Mehmet and Lisa Oz • Rodney and Holly Robinson Peete Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Bert Pogrebin • Rob and Michele Reiner Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos • Al Roker and Deborah Roberts Ray and Anna Romano • Tony Shalhoub and Brooke Adams Judges Judy and Jerry Sheindlin • George Stephanopoulos and Ali Wentworth Sting and Trudie Styler • Capt. Chesley “Sully” and Lorrie Sullenberger Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner • Judith and Milton Viorst Judy Woodruff and Al Hunt • Bob Woodward and Elsa Walsh
The Welsh Marches, 1460 In the eerie depths of Llanwardine Priory, Elizabeth de Lacy is about to take the veil when she is told she must wed her family's sworn enemy! Lord Richard Malinder must produce an heir, and a union with the de Lacy family could prove advantageous—if only to keep his enemies close…. The heat of anticipation rises as they make their way to the bridal chamber….
“A luminous, Marquez-esque tale” (O, The Oprah Magazine) from the New York Times bestselling author of The Museum of Extraordinary Things: a forbidden love story set on a tropical island about the extraordinary woman who gave birth to painter Camille Pissarro—the Father of Impressionism. Growing up on idyllic St. Thomas in the early 1800s, Rachel dreams of life in faraway Paris. Rachel’s mother, a pillar of their small refugee community of Jews who escaped the Inquisition, has never forgiven her daughter for being a difficult girl who refuses to live by the rules. Growing up, Rachel’s salvation is their maid Adelle’s belief in her strengths, and her deep, life-long friendship with Jestine, Adelle’s daughter. But Rachel’s life is not her own. She is married off to a widower with three children to save her father’s business. When her older husband dies suddenly and his handsome, much younger nephew, Frédérick, arrives from France to settle the estate, Rachel seizes her own life story, beginning a defiant, passionate love affair that sparks a scandal that affects all of her family, including her favorite son, who will become one of the greatest artists of France. “A work of art” (Dallas Morning News), The Marriage of Opposites showcases the beloved, bestselling Alice Hoffman at the height of her considerable powers. “Her lush, seductive prose, and heart-pounding subject…make this latest skinny-dip in enchanted realism…the Platonic ideal of the beach read” (Slate.com). Once forgotten to history, the marriage of Rachel and Frédérick “will only renew your commitment to Hoffman’s astonishing storytelling” (USA TODAY).
The definitive anthology of wisdom and wit about one of life’s most complex, intriguing, and personal subjects. When and whom do you marry? How do you keep a spouse content? Do all engaged couples get cold feet? How cold is so cold that you should pivot and flee? Where and how do children fit in? Is infidelity always wrong? In this volume, you won’t find a single answer to your questions about marriage; you will find hundreds. Spanning centuries and cultures, sources and genres, The Marriage Book offers entries from ancient history and modern politics, poetry and pamphlets, plays and songs, newspaper ads and postcards. It is an A to Z compendium, exploring topics from Adam and Eve to Anniversaries, Fidelity to Freedom, Separations to Sex. In this volume, you’ll hear from novelists, clergymen, sex experts, and presidents, with guest appearances by the likes of Liz and Dick, Ralph and Alice, Louis CK, and Neil Patrick Harris. Casanova calls marriage the tomb of love, and Stephen King calls it his greatest accomplishment. With humor, perspective, breadth, and warmth, The Marriage Book is sure to become a classic.
An Ordinary Marriage is the story of the Chikhachevs, middling-income gentry landowners in nineteenth-century provincial Russia. In a seemingly strange contradiction, the mother of this family, Natalia, oversaw serf labor and managed finances while the father, Andrei, raised the children, at a time when domestic ideology advocating a woman's place in the home was at its height in European advice manuals. But Andrei Chikhachev defined masculinity as a realm of intellectualism; the father could be in charge of moral education, defined as an intellectual task. Managing estates that often barely yielded a livable income was a practical task and therefore considered less elevated, though still vitally important to the family's interests. Thus estate management was available to gentry women like Natalia Chikhacheva, and the fact that it inevitably expanded their realm of influence and opportunity (within the limits of their estates), and that it increased their centrality to the family's material security relative to their social counterparts to the west, was accidental. An Ordinary Marriage examines the daily activities and ideas of the family based on multiple overlapping diaries and informal correspondence by the husband, wife, and son of the family, as well as the wife's brother. No such cache of intimate Russian family documents has ever previously been studied in such depth. The family's relative obscurity (with no pretensions to fame, wealth, or influence) and the presence of a woman's private documents are especially unusual in any context. The book considers the Chikhachevs' social life, reading habits, attitudes toward illness and death, as well as their marital roles and their reception of major ideas of their time, such as domesticity, Enlightenment, sentimentalism, and Romanticism.
Healthy marriages do not simply happen, though our culture's marriage landscape suggests otherwise. Married couples need a strong foundation that the majority of people cannot build on their own. How can ministers best prepare engaged couples for the altar? And how can ministers help provide the needed material for healthy growth among married couples in their cultures? Marriage Ministry: A Guidebook by noted pastors, authors, and seminar leaders Bo Prosser and Charles Qualls provides a ready help for ministers who provide premarital counseling, perform wedding ceremonies, and generally care for married couples and their families. Full of information and ideas that encourage conversation, communication, and interaction, this book will help ministers respond to the many needs of couples in the church. Whether your ministerial needs are with the newly married, the successfully married, or the struggling married, Marriage Ministry will surely help you help them.
Today we like to think that marriage is a free choice based on love: that we freely choose whom to marry and that we do so, not so much for survival or social advantage, but for love. The invention of marriage for love inverted the old relationship between love and marriage. In the past, marriage was sacred, and love, if it existed at all, was a consequence of marriage; today, love is sacred and marriage is secondary. But now marriage appears to be becoming increasingly superfluous. For the past forty years or so, the number of weddings has been declining, the number of divorces exploding and the number of unmarried individuals and couples growing, while single-parent families are becoming more numerous. Love has triumphed over marriage but now it is destroying it from inside. So has the ideal of marriage for love failed, and has love finally been liberated from the shackles of marriage? In this brilliant and provocative book Pascal Bruckner argues that the old tension between love and marriage has not been resolved in favour of love, it has simply been displaced onto other levels. Even if it seems more straightforward, the contemporary landscape of love is far from euphoric: as in the past, infidelity, loss and betrayal are central to the plots of modern love, and the disenchantment is all the greater because marriages are voluntary and not imposed. But the collapse of the ideal of marriage for love is not necessarily a cause for remorse, because it demonstrates that love retains its subversive power. Love is not a glue to be put in the service of the institution of marriage: it is an explosive that blows up in our faces, dynamite pure and simple.
The Marriage Paradox explores both national U.S. data and a smaller sample of emerging adults to find out how they really view marriage today. Interspersed with real stories and insight from emerging adults themselves, this book attempts to make sense of the increasingly paradoxical ways that young adults are thinking about marriage.
