The husband and wife team behind Giannetti Home welcome readers into their gorgeous farm residence blending modern style with French antiques. When Brooke and Steve Giannetti decided to leave their suburban Santa Monica home to build a new life on a farm, they traveled to Belgium and France for design inspiration. In Patina Farm they share their collaborative process, as well as the enviable result of their team effort and creativity: an idyllic farm in California’s Ojai Valley. With two hundred gorgeous photographs and Steve’s architectural drawings, Brooke takes readers through their inspirations, thought process, and materials selections. Readers are given a full tour of the family home, guesthouse, lush gardens, and delightful animal quarters.

The Years of Lyndon Johnson is the political biography of our time. No president—no era of American politics—has been so intensively and sharply examined at a time when so many prime witnesses to hitherto untold or misinterpreted facets of a life, a career, and a period of history could still be persuaded to speak. The Path to Power, Book One, reveals in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy, and urge to power that set LBJ apart. Chronicling the startling early emergence of Johnson’s political genius, it follows him from his Texas boyhood through the years of the Depression in the Texas hill Country to the triumph of his congressional debut in New Deal Washington, to his heartbreaking defeat in his first race for the Senate, and his attainment, nonetheless, of the national power for which he hungered. We see in him, from earliest childhood, a fierce, unquenchable necessity to be first, to win, to dominate—coupled with a limitless capacity for hard, unceasing labor in the service of his own ambition. Caro shows us the big, gangling, awkward young Lyndon—raised in one of the country’s most desperately poor and isolated areas, his education mediocre at best, his pride stung by his father’s slide into failure and financial ruin—lunging for success, moving inexorably toward that ultimate “impossible” goal that he sets for himself years before any friend or enemy suspects what it may be. We watch him, while still at college, instinctively (and ruthlessly) creating the beginnings of the political machine that was to serve him for three decades. We see him employing his extraordinary ability to mesmerize and manipulate powerful older men, to mesmerize (and sometimes almost enslave) useful subordinates. We see him carrying out, before his thirtieth year, his first great political inspiration: tapping-and becoming the political conduit for-the money and influence of the new oil men and contractors who were to grow with him to immense power. We follow, close up, the radical fluctuations of his relationships with the formidable “Mr. Sam” Raybum (who loved him like a son and whom he betrayed) and with FDR himself. And we follow the dramas of his emotional life-the intensities and complications of his relationships with his family, his contemporaries, his girls; his wooing and winning of the shy Lady Bird; his secret love affair, over many years, with the mistress of one of his most ardent and generous supporters . . . Johnson driving his people to the point of exhausted tears, equally merciless with himself . . . Johnson bullying, cajoling, lying, yet inspiring an amazing loyalty . . . Johnson maneuvering to dethrone the unassailable old Jack Garner (then Vice President of the United States) as the New Deal’s “connection” in Texas, and seize the power himself . . . Johnson raging . . . Johnson hugging . . . Johnson bringing light and, indeed, life to the worn Hill Country farmers and their old-at-thirty wives via the district’s first electric lines. We see him at once unscrupulous, admirable, treacherous, devoted. And we see the country that bred him: the harshness and “nauseating loneliness” of the rural life; the tragic panorama of the Depression; the sudden glow of hope at the dawn of the Age of Roosevelt. And always, in the foreground, on the move, LBJ. Here is Lyndon Johnson—his Texas, his Washington, his America—in a book that brings us as close as we have ever been to a true perception of political genius and the American political process.

In the first statewide guidebook of its kind, Farm Fresh North Carolina takes readers on a lively tour of more than 425 farms, produce stands, farmers' markets, wineries, children-friendly pumpkin patches and corn mazes, pick-your-own orchards, restaurants, bed and breakfasts, agricultural festivals, and more, all open to the public and personally vetted by travel writer Diane Daniel. Daniel's animated, knowledgeable recommendations will give food lovers, families, locals, and travelers the inspiration and resources they need to cut a fresh Christmas tree, pick a peck of apples, take a fall hay ride, sample wine from locally harvested grapes, or spend the night on a working farm. Sidebars offer information about the state's agricultural history, politics, and eccentricities, while twenty recipes gathered from North Carolina farmers, innkeepers, and chefs provide delicious ways to use the day's pickings. Emphasizing farms and establishments that are independent, sustainable, and active in public education and conservation, this delightful guidebook will help North Carolinians and visitors discover how the burgeoning farm movement has become a bridge between North Carolina's past and present. The publication of this book was supported by a grant from the Golden LEAF Foundation. Southern Gateways Guide is a registered trademark of the University of North Carolina Press