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""When Ben Hewitt and his wife bought a sprawling acreage of field and forest in northern Vermont, the landscape easily allowed them to envision the self-sustaining family farm they were eager to start. But over the years, the land became so much more than a building site; it became the birthplace of their two sons, the main source of family income and food, and ultimately, both classroom and home for their children. Having opted out of formal...

There's a new set of 3Rs for our kids--respect, responsibility, and resilience--to better prepare them for life in the real world. Once developed, these skills let kids take charge, and let parents step back, to the benefit of all. Casting hover mothers and helicopter parents aside, Vicki Hoefle encourages a different, counter-intuitive, yet much more effective, approach to parenting: for parents to sit on their hands, stay on the sidelines--even...

""For more than twenty-five years, David Sedaris has been carving out a unique literary space, virtually creating his own genre. A Sedaris story may seem confessional, but is also highly attuned to the world outside. It opens our eyes to what is at absurd and moving about our daily existence. And it is almost impossible to read without laughing. Now, for the first time collected in one volume, the author brings us his funniest and most memorable work....

The author describes how after a series of life-altering events, including her husband of fifteen years announcing his homosexuality and near-fatal car accident, the California poet journeys back to her family to heal within the Mennonite community that she had parted with years before.

""Any story that starts will also end." As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart. At the center of These Precious Days is the title essay, a surprising and moving meditation on an unexpected friendship that explores "what it means to be seen, to find someone...

Share with the Robinsons--a minister, his wife, and four sons--as they survive a shipwreck and then adapt to life on an island populated by exotic birds and animals. Through small successes and disappointments, not only does this courageous family survive, but comes to find a happiness that eluded them in their civilized homeland.

A memoir discussing the author's upbringing as a young sportsman and tragic experience in a plane crash with his father, father's girlfriend, and pilot at the age of eleven, covering his lone survival of the crash and harsh conditions.

Drawing on Charles Dickens's own, often difficult childhood, to create a compelling story of personal success, David Copperfield is edited with an introduction and notes by Jeremy Tambling in Penguin Classics. David Copperfield is the story of a young man's adventures on his journey from an unhappy and impoverished childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist. Among the gloriously vivid cast of characters he encounters are...

By turns romantic and harshly realistic, Hemingway's story of a tragic romance set against the brutality and confusion of World War I cemented his fame as a stylist and as a writer of extraordinary literary power. A volunteer ambulance driver and a beautiful English nurse fall in love when he is wounded on the Italian front. The best American novel to emerge from World War I, A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver...

When she heard the news that her 19-year-old son, Sam, was about to be a father, Anne began a journal to chronicle her grandson's first year. She tells of her relationship with Sam and the baby's mother. Anne also remembers what it was like raising Sam as a single mother.