The Armchair Book of Gardens is a collection of indiviual essays focused on understanding gardens in a different light/perspective. The book concentrates on the emotional, social, spiritual, and politicial aspects of the garden.

Gathers travel writings by Margaret Atwood, Peter Benchley, Heinrich Boll, Bruce Chatwin, Gerald Durrell, Graham Greene, Peter Matthiessen, John McPhee, and Paul Theroux

This readable, accessible narrative story of the Protestant Reformation is written for lay audiences. It is part of the popular Westminster John Knox Press Armchair series and is illustrated with memorable cartoons by Ron Hill. The chapters of the book are suitable for use in church adult education settings to provide a solid grounding in the history of the Reformation and its leading ideas. Questions for discussion and suggestions for further reading provided for each chapter make this book great for group study. Since the Protestant Reformation is such a formative event in the lives of churches, it is important to have an accessible resource to tell its story available for laypersons in all denominations. Written by experts but designed for the nonexpert, the Armchair series provides accurate, concise, and witty overviews of some of the most profound moments and theologians in Christian history. These books are an essential supplement for first-time encounters with primary texts, a lucid refresher for scholars and clergy, and an enjoyable read for the theologically curious.

Armchair travel may seem like an oxymoron. Doesn’t travel require us to leave the house? And yet, anyone who has lost herself for hours in the descriptive pages of a novel or the absorbing images of a film knows the very real feeling of having explored and experienced a different place or time without ever leaving her seat. No passport, no currency, no security screening required—the luxury of armchair travel is accessible to us all. In Traveling in Place, Bernd Stiegler celebrates this convenient, magical means of transport in all its many forms. Organized into twenty-one “legs”—or short chapters—Traveling in Place begins with a consideration of Xavier de Maistre’s 1794 Voyage autour de ma chambre, an account of the forty-two-day “journey around his room” Maistre undertook as a way to entertain himself while under house arrest. Stiegler is fascinated by the notion of exploring the familiar as though it were completely new and strange. He engages writers as diverse as Roussel, Beckett, Perec, Robbe-Grillet, Cortázar, Kierkegaard, and Borges, all of whom show how the everyday can be brilliantly transformed. Like the best guidebooks, Traveling in Place is more interested in the idea of travel as a state of mind than as a physical activity, and Stiegler reflects on the different ways that traveling at home have manifested themselves in the modern era, from literature and film to the virtual possibilities of the Internet, blogs, and contemporary art. Reminiscent of the pictorial meditations of Sebald, but possessed of the intellectual playfulness of Calvino, Traveling in Place offers an entertaining and creative Baedeker to journeying at home.