There aren't many books more beloved than “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” and even fewer authors as iconic as Beatrix Potter. Her characters- Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddle Duck, and all the rest, exist in a charmed world filled with flowers and gardens. In Beatrix Potter's Gardening Life, bestselling author Marta McDowell explores the origins of Beatrix Potter's love of gardening and plants and shows how this passion came to be reflected in her work. The...

It had been nearly a century since elephants had lived in Southern Zululand, South Africa, where Lawrence Anthony founded his Thula Thula wildlife reserve. Yet one day a phone call changed all that. A troubled, unpredictable herd needed a new home. In order to save their lives, Lawrence took them in, and in the years that followed found that they had a lot to teach him about life, loyalty, and freedom. He tells of hair-raising fights with poachers,...

"At the height of the Third Reich, media outlets around the world showcased Hitler's homes to audiences eager for behind-the-scenes stories. After the war, fascination with Hitler's domestic life continued as soldiers and journalists searched his dwellings for insights into his psychology. The book's rich illustrations, many previously unpublished, offer readers a rare glimpse into the decisions involved in the making of Hitler's homes and into the...

The author's memoir of growing up black in the 1930s and 1940s.

"This lushly illustrated book from bestselling author Marta McDowell examines Laura Ingalls Wilder's relationship to the landscape and illuminates how it inspired the beloved Little House Books" --

Describes the sad life of Huguette Clark, heiress to a copper magnate's fortune, who withdrew from society to live in isolation in a huge 5th Avenue apartment before spending the last years of her life in a New York hospital.

Growing up in the snowblower society of Buffalo, New York, Laura Pedersen's first words were most likely "turn the wheel into a skid." Like many families subsisting in the frigid North during the energy crisis, the Pedersens feared rising prices at the gas pump, argued about the thermostat, fought over the dog to stay warm at night, and often slept in their clothes. While her parents were preoccupied with surviving separation and stagflation, daughter...

The author tells of the years she spent from 1914 to 1931 managing a coffee plantation in Kenya.

The charming, funny, and improbable tale of how a man who was raised on white bread--and didn't speak a word of French--unexpectedly ended up with the sacred duty of preparing the annual Christmas dinner for a venerable Parisian family. Hemingway called Paris "a moveable feast"--A city ready to embrace you at any time in life. For Los Angeles-based film critic John Baxter, that moment came when he fell in love with a French woman and impulsively moved...

Presents two texts by American writer Henry David Thoreau: "Walden," in which he offers his philosophy of life and observations of nature gleaned from a year of solitary living in a cabin on Walden Pond in Massachusetts, and "Civil Disobedience," a treatise on nonviolent resistance and protest.