"Hubka argues that even "vernacular architecture" scholars tend to embrace a model for understanding home forms that relies on iconic architects and theories about how ideas proceed downward from aesthetic ideals to home construction, even though this model fails to adequately characterize the vast majority actual homes that people live in, particularly in recent times after the widespread growth of suburban America. This controversial book proposes new ways to categorize houses"--
Combining her other research with interviews of nearly fifty Italian immigrants of her grandparents' generation, Adria Bernardi has crafted a memorable oral history of a community of working-class immigrants. Bernardi tells their story clearly and with care, interspersing transcriptions and translations with her own recollections and interpretations of life among the Italian immigrants of Highwood.
This New York Times bestselling book is filled with hundreds of fun, deceptively simple, budget-friendly ideas for sprucing up your home. With two home renovations under their (tool) belts and millions of hits per month on their blog YoungHouseLove.com, Sherry and John Petersik are home-improvement enthusiasts primed to pass on a slew of projects, tricks, and techniques to do-it-yourselfers of all levels. Packed with 243 tips and ideas—both classic and unexpected—and more than 400 photographs and illustrations, this is a book that readers will return to again and again for the creative projects and easy-to-follow instructions in the relatable voice the Petersiks are known for. Learn to trick out a thrift-store mirror, spice up plain old roller shades, "hack" your Ikea table to create three distinct looks, and so much more.
The borough of Queens has long been celebrated as the melting pot of America. It was the birthplace of North American religious freedom in the seventeenth century, hosted two World's Fairs in the twentieth, and is currently home to over a million foreign-born residents participating in the American experience. In 2013, Spanish-born artist and architect Rafael Herrin-Ferri began to paint a portrait of the "World's Borough"--not with images of its diverse population, or its celebrated international food scene, but with photographs of its highly idiosyncratic housing stock. While All the Queens Houses is mainly a photography book celebrating the broad range of housing styles in New York City's largest and most diverse county, it is also a not-so-subtle endorsement of a multicultural community that mixes global building traditions into the American vernacular, and by so doing breathes new life into its architecture and surrounding urban context.
This book discusses developments in the history of British house names from the earliest written evidence (Beowulf's Heorot) to the twentieth century. Chapters 1 and 2 track changes from medieval naming practices such as Ceolmundingchaga and Prestebures, to present-day house names such as Fairholme and Oakdene: that is, the shift from recording the name of the householder (Sabelinesbury, 'Sabeline's manor'), the householder's occupation (le Taninghus, 'the tannery') and the appearance of the house (le Brodedore, 'the broad door'); to the five main categories still in use today: the transferred place-name (Aberdeen House), the nostalgically rural (Springfield), the commemorative (Blenheim Palace), the upwardly mobile (Vernon Lodge), and the latest fashion (Fernville). The development and demise of pub names and shop names such as la Worm on the Hope and the Golden Tea Kettle & Speaking Trumpet are detailed, and the rise of heraldic names such as the Red Lion is explained. Chapters 3-5 track the house name Sunnyside backwards in time to prehistory, through English, Latin, Scottish Gaelic, and the influence of Old Norse. Sunnyside's ancient origins lie in the Nordic practice of solskifte, a prehistoric method of dividing up land according to position of shadows, but the name was boosted in the eighteenth century by Nonconformists (especially Quakers), who took it to America, and in the nineteenth century by American celebrity influence. The book contains an appendix of the earliest London house names to the year 1400, and a gazetteer of historic Sunnysides.
Building can be seen as a master metaphor for modernity, which some great irresistible force, be it Fascism or Communism or capitalism, is always busy rebuilding, and Houses is a book about a man, Arsénie Negovan, who has devoted his life and his dreams to building. Bon vivant, Francophile, visionary, Negovan spent the first half of his life building houses he loved and even named—Juliana, Christina, Agatha—while making his hometown of Belgrade into a modern city to be proud of. The second half of his life, after World War II and the Nazi occupation, he has spent in one of those houses, looked after by his wife and a nurse, in hiding. Houses is set on the final day of his life, when Negovan at last ventures forth to see the world as it is. Negovan is one of the great characters in modern fiction, a man of substance and a deluded fantasist, a beguiling visionary and a monster of selfishness, a charmer no matter what. And perhaps he is right to fear that home is only an illusion in our world, or that only in illusion is there home.
On 17 December 1980, at 9:47 am, two men shot the Turkish consul-general to Sydney and his bodyguard near the consul's home in Vaucluse. The assassins aimed, fired, and vanished. My Name Is Revenge by Australian-Armenian author Ashley Kalagian Blunt is a novella set in 1980s Sydney and based on true events. Accompanied by essays.
Pulitzer Prize Finalist | New York Times Bestseller | A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick | A New York Times Book Review Notable Book | TIME Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of the Year Named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, The Washington Post; O: The Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Good Housekeeping, Vogue, Refinery29, and Buzzfeed From Ann Patchett, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth, comes a powerful, richly moving story that explores the indelible bond between two siblings, the house of their childhood, and a past that will not let them go. The Dutch House is the story of a paradise lost, a tour de force that digs deeply into questions of inheritance, love and forgiveness, of how we want to see ourselves and of who we really are. At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves. The story is told by Cyril’s son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother. The two wealthy siblings are thrown back into the poverty their parents had escaped from and find that all they have to count on is one another. It is this unshakeable bond between them that both saves their lives and thwarts their futures. Set over the course of five decades, The Dutch House is a dark fairy tale about two smart people who cannot overcome their past. Despite every outward sign of success, Danny and Maeve are only truly comfortable when they’re together. Throughout their lives they return to the well-worn story of what they’ve lost with humor and rage. But when at last they’re forced to confront the people who left them behind, the relationship between an indulged brother and his ever-protective sister is finally tested.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic about a young girl growing up in Chicago • Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. “Cisneros draws on her rich [Latino] heritage...and seduces with precise, spare prose, creat[ing] unforgettable characters we want to lift off the page. She is not only a gifted writer, but an absolutely essential one.” —The New York Times Book Review The House on Mango Street is one of the most cherished novels of the last fifty years. Readers from all walks of life have fallen for the voice of Esperanza Cordero, growing up in Chicago and inventing for herself who and what she will become. “In English my name means hope,” she says. “In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting." Told in a series of vignettes—sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes joyous—Cisneros’s masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery and one of the greatest neighborhood novels of all time. Like Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street or Toni Morrison’s Sula, it makes a world through people and their voices, and it does so in language that is poetic and direct. This gorgeous coming-of-age novel is a celebration of the power of telling one’s story and of being proud of where you're from.
