Temina is excited about taking a trip on an airplane, and super-excited to include ALL of her toys and dolls on the trip as well. Until mom says: "You can bring just ONE doll." Impossible! How is she going to pick just ONE? She hatches a top secret plan and sneaks more than one toy into the airport and onto the plane. While everyone around her gawks, Temina proudly displays her beloved companions. Word spreads quickly to other children on the plane, who feel lonely without their own dolls. Temina is happy to lend out her treasures. The flight becomes a happy memory for Temina and her family, and even more so months later when her generosity is rewarded in the most surprising way!

Marie Kondo is for the birds in this hilarious picture book about expectant magpie parents and the dangers of having too many things! Magpies Meg and Ash want to build the perfect nest for their eggs. They use the usual mud, sticks, and grass, but are soon convinced that it’s not enough! Meg and Ash collect all kinds of things—cuckoo clocks, mops, socks, and more—and put them in an ever-growing pile of what they might need to make a home for their chicks. But as the tower of things grows more and more wobbly, the birds might just find out they have too much stuff!

How humans became so dependent on things and how this need has grown dangerously out of control. Over three million years ago, our ancient ancestors realized that rocks could be broken into sharp-edged objects for slicing meat, making the first knives. This discovery resulted in a good meal, and eventually changed the fate of our species and our planet. With So Much Stuff, archaeologist Chip Colwell sets out to investigate why humankind went from self-sufficient primates to nonstop shoppers, from needing nothing to needing everything. Along the way, he uncovers spectacular and strange points around the world—an Italian cave with the world’s first known painted art, a Hong Kong skyscraper where a priestess channels the gods, and a mountain of trash that rivals the Statue of Liberty. Through these examples, Colwell shows how humanity took three leaps that led to stuff becoming inseparable from our lives, inspiring a love affair with things that may lead to our downfall. Now, as landfills brim and oceans drown in trash, Colwell issues a timely call to reevaluate our relationship with the things that both created and threaten to undo our overstuffed planet.

Are your counters covered with appliances you had to have but rarely use? Are your cupboards stuffed with clothes that you hope to fit back into or that you paid a fortune for but only wore once? Have you been hanging on to that hideous teapot your mother gave you 10 years ago only because she gave it to you? Every time you go shopping do you come back with bags of more stuff because that pillow/blouse/cd/mixer will be the one thing that changes your life and then it doesn't change your life because you have nowhere to put it? In It's All Too Much,organisational guru Peter Walsh challenges you to answer a very simple but scary question: Does the stuff you own contribute to the life you hope to achieve or does it get in the way of your vision? Peter helps you assess the state of your home without any sugar coating and will teach you how to confront and conquer the stuff that is holding you back by identifying the purpose of each and every object in your home and assessing your reasons for holding onto it. He shows you how to identify which room is the heart of your home and then shows you why it is so important to keep that space clean and clear of clutter - if the heart of your home is clogged what does that say about you? He then helps you go room by room to ask the important questions: What is the room? What's its purpose? What is this item? Does it contribute positively to the life you want? The answers to these questions will help you understand your priorities and fix your relationship with your stuff. And in gaining this understanding you can start to clear out the clutter!

The tale of a little girl who loves to carry almost all of her possessions whenever she leaves home. She soon learns that having too much stuff can create a world of trouble. She makes a self discovery that sharing her things with others is a happy solution.

We all have treasured possessions—a favorite pair of shoes, a much-beloved chair, an ever-expanding record collection. But sometimes, this emotional attachment to our belongings can spiral out of control and culminate into a condition called compulsive hoarding. From hobbyists and collectors to pack rats and compulsive shoppers—it is close to impossible for hoarders to relinquish their precious objects, even if it means that stuff takes over their lives and their homes. According to psychologist Dr. Robin Zasio, our fascination with hoarding stems from the fact that most of us fall somewhere on the hoarding continuum. Even though it may not regularly interfere with our everyday lives, to some degree or another, many of us hoard. The Hoarder In You provides practical advice for decluttering and organizing, including how to tame the emotional pull of acquiring additional things, make order out of chaos by getting a handle on clutter, and create an organizational system that reduces stress and anxiety. Dr. Zasio also shares some of the most serious cases of hoarding that she's encountered, and explains how we can learn from these extreme examples—no matter where we are on the hoarding continuum.

Winner of the 2014 John Collier Jr. Award Winner of the Jo Anne Stolaroff Cotsen Prize Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century cross-cuts the ranks of important books on social history, consumerism, contemporary culture, the meaning of material culture, domestic architecture, and household ethnoarchaeology. It is a distant cousin of Material World and Hungry Planet in content and style, but represents a blend of rigorous science and photography that these books can claim. Using archaeological approaches to human material culture, this volume offers unprecedented access to the middle-class American home through the kaleidoscopic lens of no-limits photography and many kinds of never-before acquired data about how people actually live their lives at home. Based on a rigorous, nine-year project at UCLA, this book has appeal not only to scientists but also to all people who share intense curiosity about what goes on at home in their neighborhoods. Many who read the book will see their own lives mirrored in these pages and can reflect on how other people cope with their mountains of possessions and other daily challenges. Readers abroad will be equally fascinated by the contrasts between their own kinds of materialism and the typical American experience. The book will interest a range of designers, builders, and architects as well as scholars and students who research various facets of U.S. and global consumerism, cultural history, and economic history.