Before Pierre Deux's French Country enchanted the world with the warmth and exuberant spirit of Provencal design, the charms of French Country style had remained hidden behind the closed doors of the farmhouses, chateaux and auberges that dot the countryside of France. This seminal book revealed a unique aesthetic that has evolved over hundreds of years to arrive at a look that is perfectly adapted to its time and place. Now, Linda Dannenberg, co-author of French Country, returns to Provence to capture not only the best of the old traditions but also to present the latest design developments and trends in le style provencal. New French Country takes you on privileged tours that include a lavish apartment in Avignon, a lushly landscaped estate in the Luberon and an antique ochre mill in Rousillon, treating you to a fascinating narrative about local customs and handicrafts. In addition to chapters on the colours, fabrics, furniture, pottery, architectural elements and gardens of Provence, New French Country includes an extensive directory to the best the region has to offer, and an overview of its most charming shops and most accomplished artisans.

Thirteen years after the publication of Collecting American Country, Mary Emmerling returns with this new book that focuses on today's country collecting scene. Illustrated with 350 full-color photos, this book explores the latest trends by taking readers into the homes of 21 dealers and collectors.

THE STORY: Country music star Justin Spears is young, handsome, hugely famous, hugely wealthy, and has an ego at the top of the charts. On the eve of Justin’s wedding day, his ruthless managers, Paul and Chuck, try in vain to keep an unruly entourage under control. Enter Ollie, the star-struck hotel bellboy with a cockeyed view of fame; Sharon, Justin’s vigilante, scorned ex-girlfriend; and dirty old pig-farming Uncle Jim who arrives with inflatable lady, Wanda June Whitmore. So how does this raucous rodeo go so wrong…so fast? Welcome to the NEW COUNTRY, where the hits just keep on comin’.

In an illuminating collection of selected poems over thirty-five years, one of our most essential American poets casts a clear eye on our politics, our places, and our heart’s hidden stories. D. Nurkse’s immigrant parents met on a boat out of Europe in 1940; he was a child of the generation whose anxieties were forged in the shadow of Hiroshima and the aftermath of WWII. His poems extend that child’s dignified ignorance into an open encounter with the cataclysms of the latter twentieth century and with family structures. Whispers of the old country of Estonia provide the backdrop for the boy’s baseballs, thrown in the fading twilight of the 1950s (“Secretly, I was proudest of my skill / at standing alone in the darkness”). The young man explores sexual passion and the arrival of a child in a young marriage (“We showed her daylight in our cupped hands”), while the mature poet writes of loneliness and community in our cities (“but on the streets / there was no one”), and the urgent need for us to keep expressing our will as citizens. Throughout this matchless career, over eleven books, Nurkse has crafted visceral lines that celebrate the fragility of what simply exists—birdsong, moonrise, illness, water towers—and the complexity of human perception, our stumble forward through it toward understanding.

What is it like to leave behind everything and everyone you’ve ever known amidst terror, trauma, and war, knowing you will never see them again? How must it feel to come to a strange, new land, and have to build a community from scratch? And what, finally, does it mean to pass on this legacy to your children, and theirs? The engrossing story of Chrystyna Zorych Holman’s family touches on all these questions. As part of the third wave of Ukrainian immigration post-WWII, they came to Canada as refugees. Her parents, both writers and activists, met at a rally for a free and democratic Ukraine—a cause they would champion even after their move to Canada. With their two young children in tow—Chrystyna and her baby sister, Kvitka—they would make the incredible crossing of the Atlantic by boat to start a new life in Manitoba, only narrowly missing the Gulags. Despite harrowing beginnings, Holman’s story is a tale of love, levity, and the beauty of community. Readers young and old will appreciate the intergenerational story she weaves as her family moves from Manitoba to Toronto to Charlottetown, recounting tales of her mother’s acerbic wit in dealing with her young students, her father’s rebuffs of her potential college beau, or her daughters bonding with her parents through the traditions they brought from home. Holman’s tale involves a wide cast of characters from the Ukrainian-Canadian community that congregated around her family, and speaks to a world of invaluable Ukrainian cultural knowledge—touching on everything from Christmas traditions, embroidery, and pysanky to the poems of women political prisoners in the USSR. It is sure to make a wonderful addition to the shelves of Ukrainian-Canadians interested in their history—or anyone looking for a more intimate sense of the multicultural fabric of Canadian society.

Merging scholarly insight with a professional guitarist's sense of the musical life, Yankee Twang delves into the rich tradition of country & western music that is played and loved in the mill towns and cities of the American northeast. Scholar and musician Clifford R. Murphy draws on a wealth of ethnographic material, interviews, and encounters with recorded and live music to reveal the central role of country and western in the social lives and musical activity of working-class New Englanders. As Murphy shows, an extraordinary multiculturalism sets New England country and western music apart from other regional and national forms. Once segregated at work and worship, members of different ethnic groups used the country and western popularized on the radio and by barnstorming artists to come together at social events, united by a love of the music. Musicians, meanwhile, drew from the wide variety of ethnic musical traditions to create the New England style. But the music also gave--and gives--voice to working-class feeling. Murphy explores how the Yankee love of country and western emphasizes the western, reflecting the longing of many blue collar workers for the mythical cowboy's life of rugged but fulfilling individualism. Indeed, many New Englanders use country and western to comment on economic disenfranchisement and express their resentment of a mass media, government, and Nashville music establishment that they believe neither reflects their experiences nor considers them equal participants in American life.

New Britain presents Tony Blair on all the major debates of British public life: from nationalized health care to crime prevention, from the welfare state to monetary policy, from religion to family values, from individualism to isolationism, from taxation to trade unions, from NATO to Northern Ireland, from community rebirth to economic growth. After seventeen years of Conservative Party rule under Margaret Thatcher and John Major, a change in Great Britain's leadership appears imminent. In Blair's Stakeholder Nation, government works in partnership with private and voluntary sectors to harness the pawer of the market to serve the public interest. In New Britain, we read in Blair's own articulate words how to improve the standard of living of all Britain's families; how to base a new social order on merit, commitment, and inclusion; how to decentralize British institutions of political power; and how to expand Britain's leadership in foreign affairs.