China; Home; House; Life; Place; Rural; Tradition; Transformation.

Finalist for the IODE Violet Downey Book Award Samira is only nine years old when the Turkish army invades northwestern Persia in 1918, and she and her parents, brother and baby sister are driven from their tiny village. Taking only what they can carry, they flee into the mountains, but the journey is so difficult that only Samira and her older brother, Benyamin, survive. When Samira finally arrives in a refugee camp, it is her friendship with another orphan, Anna, that pulls her out of her sadness. And when the two girls are given a toddler named Elias to care for, they form a new kind of family. Over the years the children are shunted from one refugee camp to another, from Persia to Iraq and back again, and finally end up in an orphanage, where it seems that they will live out their childhood. Then a new orphanage director arrives -- Susan Shedd, a woman whose authority and energy Samira has never seen before. And Samira’s respect turns to amazement when Miss Shedd decides that she will take the three hundred children back to their home villages to make new lives for themselves. It will be a journey of three hundred miles, through the mountains, and it will be made on foot.

The updated and highly illustrated guide to understanding how just about everything in your house works! The revised and updated third edition of How Your House Works is a hands-on guide that gives you the low-down on why your faucet is leaking, your dishwasher is overflowing, or your furnace is on the fritz. This comprehensive book is your reference to virtually everything in your house with richly illustrated explanations of electrical systems, heating and air conditioning, plumbing, major household appliances, foundation, framing, doors, and windows. This must-have book answers most questions homeowners face when repairs are needed or when a new house or addition is in your future. How Your House Works is filled with easy-to-understand illustrations that show how things should be put together and how they function. The book also highlights issues outside the house as well as clock thermostats, ventless gas heaters, moisture and mold, and passive solar heating. Using the illustrations and the author’s clear explanations might save you the expense of calling a professional. This invaluable guide: Offers a colorful resource to home electrical systems, HVAC, plumbing, major household appliances, foundation, framing, doors and windows, sustainability, and much more Includes easy-to-follow information for troubleshooting problems Contains dozens of new full-color illustrations Presents new chapters on solar power and smart home technologies Helps homeowners save money on many common household repairs Written for homeowners with little or no knowledge of home maintenance or repair, How Your House Works is your illustrated and updated guide to understanding how appliances, electrical, plumbing, heating, air conditioning, and more work!

House as a Mirror of Self presents an unprecedented examination of our relationship to where we live, interwoven with compelling personal stories of the search for a place for the soul. Marcus takes us on a reverie of the special places of childhood--the forts we made and secret hiding places we had--to growing up and expressing ourselves in the homes of adulthood. She explores how the self-image is reflected in our homes/ power struggles in making a home together with a partner/ territory, control, and privacy at home/ self-image and location/ disruptions in the boding with home/ and beyond the "house as ego" to the call of the soul. As our culture is swept up in home improvement to the extent of having an entire TV network devoted to it, this book is essential for understanding why the surroundings that we call home make us feel the way we do. With this information we can embark on home improvement that truly makes room for our soul.

Based on extended fieldwork conducted between 2007 and 2019, this book aims to answer a simple question: What is the meaning of home for people living in vernacular settlements in rural China? This question is particularly potent since rural China has experienced rapid and fundamental changes in the twenty-first century under the influences of national policies such as "Building a New Socialist Countryside" enacted in 2006 and "Rural Revitalization" announced in 2018. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork, building surveys, archival research, and over 600 photographs taken by residents along with their life stories, this book uncovers the meanings of home from rural residents’ perspectives, who belong to a social group that is underrepresented in scholarship and underserved in modern China. In other words, this study empowers rural residents by giving them voice. This book links the concepts of place, home, and tradition into an overarching argument: The meaning of home rests on the ideas of tradition, including identity, consanguinity, collectivity, social relations, land ownership, and rural lifestyle.

The latest New York Times bestseller from the author of the beloved book club favorite The Kitchen House is a heart racing story about a man’s treacherous journey through the twists and turns of the Underground Railroad on a mission to save the boy he swore to protect. Glory Over Everything is “gripping…breathless until the end” (Kirkus Reviews). The year is 1830 and Jamie Pyke, a celebrated silversmith and notorious ladies’ man, is keeping a deadly secret. Passing as a wealthy white aristocrat in Philadelphian society, Jamie is now living a life he could never have imagined years before when he was a runaway slave, son of a southern black slave and her master. But Jamie’s carefully constructed world is threatened when he discovers that his married socialite lover, Caroline, is pregnant and his beloved servant Pan, to whose father Jamie owes his own freedom, has been captured and sold into slavery in the South. Fleeing the consequences of his deceptions, Jamie embarks on a trip to a North Carolina plantation to save Pan from the life he himself barely escaped as a boy. With the help of a fearless slave, Sukey, who has taken the terrified young boy under her wing, Jamie navigates their way, racing against time and their ruthless pursuers through the Virginia backwoods, the Underground Railroad, and the treacherous Great Dismal Swamp. “Kathleen Grissom is a first-rate storyteller…she observes with an unwavering but kind eye, and she bestows upon the reader, amid terrible secrets and sin, a gift of mercy: the belief that hope can triumph over hell” (Richmond Times Dispatch). Glory Over Everything is an emotionally rewarding and epic novel “filled with romance, villains, violence, courage, compassion…and suspense.” (Florida Courier).

The Wonderful Things About A House