Mary Gordon, bestselling author of Spending and The Shadow Man, investigates the role that place plays in the formation of identity -- the connections between how we experience place and how we become ourselves. From her grandmother's house, which stood at the center of her childhood life, to a rented house on Cape Cod, where she began to mature as a writer, Mary Gordon navigates the reader through these spaces and worlds with subtlety and style. Wise, humorous, and intelligent, Seeing Through Places illuminates the relationship between the physical, emotional, and intellectual architectures of our lives, showing us the far-reaching power that places ultimately have in influencing a life.

Traces the author's 2002 journey by foot across Afghanistan, during which he survived the harsh elements through the kindness of tribal elders, teen soldiers, Taliban commanders, and foreign-aid workers whose stories he collected along his way. By the author of The Prince of the Marshes. Original. 20,000 first printing.

How to understand color’s impact on our perception of a place—and capture its palette in watercolor landscapes and cityscapes. Whenever we first encounter a new place, whether landscape or cityscape, one of the most immediate and powerful sensations comes from its colors, or the palette of colors, which profoundly influence our reaction to and sense of a space. In Local Color, designer and educator Mimi Robinson teaches us not only how to see the colors around us but also how to capture and record them in watercolor. Regardless of your level of painting expertise, Robinson will quickly have you creating personal memories of time, place, and travel through a series of self-guided exercises and illustrated examples.

A companion to the popular YouTube series "Brian Rutenberg Studio Visits" and a love letter to painting, written by a painter.

Now a new series on Peacock with Rainn Wilson, THE GEOGRAPHY OF BLISS is part travel memoir, part humor, and part twisted self-help guide that takes the viewer across the globe to investigate not what happiness is, but WHERE it is. Are people in Switzerland happier because it is the most democratic country in the world? Do citizens of Qatar, awash in petrodollars, find joy in all that cash? Is the King of Bhutan a visionary for his initiative to calculate Gross National Happiness? Why is Asheville, North Carolina so damn happy? In a unique mix of travel, psychology, science and humor, Eric Weiner answers those questions and many others, offering travelers of all moods some interesting new ideas for sunnier destinations and dispositions.