Country roads always seem to lead you home… Culley Rutherford is doing the best he can to raise his young daughter on his own. One night while at a medical conference in New York City, Culley runs into his old friend Addy Taylor. After a passionate night together, they go their separate ways, so Culley is surprised to see Addy back in Harper’s Mill. Culley is willing to explore the attraction between them, but Addy is back in town to help her mother run their family orchard—that’s all. Slowly Culley and his daughter, Madeline, try to break down Addy’s defenses, hoping to show her that coming home for good is the best move she can make.
The landmark survey that celebrates all the places where people hang out--and is helping to spawn their revival A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice "Third places," or "great good places," are the many public places where people can gather, put aside the concerns of home and work (their first and second places), and hang out simply for the pleasures of good company and lively conversation. They are the heart of a community's social vitality and the grassroots of a democracy. Author Ray Oldenburg portrays, probes, and promotes th4ese great good places--coffee houses, cafes, bookstores, hair salons, bars, bistros, and many others both past and present--and offers a vision for their revitalization. Eloquent and visionary, this is a compelling argument for these settings of informal public life as essential for the health both of our communities and ourselves. And its message is being heard: Today, entrepreneurs from Seattle to Florida are heeding the call of The Great Good Place--opening coffee houses, bookstores, community centers, bars, and other establishments and proudly acknowledging their indebtedness to this book.
An imaginary, utterly absorbing record of the investigations of the Committee on Education, Welfare, and Public Morality of an unnamed state senate into the activities of Mr. Wissey Jones, who has come to the town of Pequot on what he says is urgent defense business. The hearings develop the suspense of a bizarre trial. It soon becomes clear that Mr. Jones buys for his corporation children of a certain sort, and that he is eager to acquire a ten-year-old named Barry Rudd, who manifests the breathtaking, prickly, sometimes obnoxious, but also deeply moving precocity of a potential genius. The dramatic conflicts exposed during the hearing revolve around the questions of exactly why Mr. Jones’s company buys children, and whether he will succeed in buying Barry. The Child Buyeris a biting commentary on some aspects of American education, on the uses of high intelligence, and on the means of defending democracy. Mr. Hersey makes fine use of the classical weapons of satire—humor and high spirits, sweet dream and nightmare, grotesqueness in the heart of normalcy—to attack not any single theory of education, but the notions that education can be an exact science; that superior minds can be set free by a national crash program; that children can be regarded as weapons; and that talent can be processed and stored for profit and defense. Although these extraordinary hearings end in a kind of horror, involving the slide into corruption or rascality or apathy of almost everyone connected with them, nevertheless the book leaves in the reader’s mind a powerful affirmation—a case for individuality, freedom of thought, integrity, faith in the young, and, above all, a better understanding of human needs in a darkling world.
Chicle is a history in four acts, all of them focused on the sticky white substance that seeps from the sapodilla tree when its bark is cut. First, Jennifer Mathews recounts the story of chicle and its earliest-known adherents, the Maya and Aztecs. Second, with the assistance of botanist Gillian Schultz, Mathews examines the sapodilla tree itself, an extraordinarily hardy plant that is native only to Mesoamerica and the Caribbean. Third, Mathews presents the fascinating story of the chicle and chewing gum industry over the last hundred plus years, a tale (like so many twentieth-century tales) of greed, growth, and collapse. In closing, Mathews considers the plight of the chicleros, the "extractors" who often work by themselves tapping trees deep in the forests, and how they have emerged as icons of local pop culture -- portrayed as fearless, hard-drinking brawlers, people to be respected as well as feared. --publisher description.
