"Nelly Custis Lewis, George Washington's adopted daughter, for over thirty years was the mistress of Woodlawn, a large and elegant Virginia plantation. Plantations were virtually self-sufficient, so that recipes for household cleaners, home remedies, and the care and dyeing of clothing, were essential for such a large household. The lady of the plantation was also responsible for providing huge and varied meals in pre-refrigeration days. During the 1830s, Mrs. Lewis kept the housekeeping book presented here. It is a collection of recipes and remedies which is interesting for its reflection of nineteenth-century plantation life. Many of the recipes may also be used with success today" --Dust jacket flap.

"The story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother. The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience."--

Fourteen months of Hornby's warm, incisive, and hilarious chronicles of the books he buys and the books he reads.In this latest collection of essays following 'The Polysyllabic Spree,' critic and author Nick Hornby continues the feverish survey of his swollen bookshelves, offering a funny, intelligent, and unblinkered account of the stuff he's been reading. Ranging from the middlebrow to the highbrow (with unrepenting dips into the lowbrow), Hornby's dispatches from his nightstand table serve as useful guides to contemporary letters, with revelations on contemporary culture, the intellectual scene, and English football, in equal measure.

A mattress, box spring, and duvet for a king-size hotel bed weighs in at 225 pounds. Imagine trying to wrestle with changing the sheets and getting the hospital corners just right; it is easy to see why hotel housekeepers experience back and shoulder injuries at increasing rates. David Brody got behind the scenes at the Chicago Hyatt Regency and the Starwood hotels in Hawaii, bypassing management and corporate press releases to interview the housekeeping staff directly. Given Brody s expertise in architecture and design, his mission here is to help us understand service design in hotels in order to situate the needs of hotel customers, housekeepers, and hotel management one relative to the other. What unfolds as a new perspective on hotels is designin terms of spaces, products, maintenance, and workflow systems. We get vivid examples of how a hotel room s design encapsulates a highly orchestrated, hidden process of management and labor, where work is invisible and surface appearances are paramount to the guest s sense of domestic comfort. ( Turndown service is one exampleroom light dimmed, drapes drawn, music on classical, turndown mat on floor, slippers in place, mint on pillow, etc.) Brody opts strongly for what he calls co-design, which means collaboration between workers and management on improving hotel design, and he is unabashedly partisan in taking sides with hotel workers and their unions. He also advocates for sustainability and green politics."