"Reflections on the Pool" spotlights forty stellar examples of pool design, ranging from the nature-inspired designs of Isabelle Greene to the vanguard mid-century pools of Thomas Church and the brilliant Mexican-style architecture of Ricardo Legorreta, plus popular tourist sites. An engaging text details the swimming pool's spread to America in the 19th century and California's influence on its popularity, while 100 luminous photos showcase the pools themselves in all their splendor.

From nineteenth-century public baths to today's private backyard havens, swimming pools have long been a provocative symbol of American life. In this social and cultural history of swimming pools in the United States, Jeff Wiltse relates how, over the years, pools have served as asylums for the urban poor, leisure resorts for the masses, and private clubs for middle-class suburbanites. As sites of race riots, shrinking swimsuits, and conspicuous leisure, swimming pools reflect many of the tensions and transformations that have given rise to modern America.

A good-natured lion sees his reflection in a pool and gasps at the fierce creature staring back at him and is too frightened to drink. Children will learn through the lion how to deal positively with fears and inhibitions that so often arise from situations they as yet may not understand. Idries Shah's collections of Eastern oral and written literature have established the Sufi teaching-story as an educational instrument. The original version of this story was told by the 13th Century Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi. Ingrid Rodriguez has illustrated this tale, bringing the animals to life with warmth and humor. Her illustrations are full of incidental and small details that make her style distinctive.

A psychological memoir by a highly trained child psychologist who falls in love with a brilliant and charming psychiatrist. Choosing to ignore all the red flags of narcissism she's been trained to recognize will later come back to haunt her.

Although others have written eloquently on the relationship of water to built form, until now no one has investigated the swimming, pool as a quintessentially modern and American space, reflecting America's infatuation with hygiene, skin, and recreation. In The Springboard in the Pond, Thomas van Leeuwen looks at a familiar hole - the domestic swimming pool - and discovers an icon indispensable to the reading of twentieth-century modernism. At one level, the book is a rereading of modern architecture that will leave that story permanently altered. At another level, it is the story of the origin and evolution of the private swimming pool as a building type and cultural artifact. And at still another level, it is a material philosophy of water. Van Leeuwen explores the human relationship to water from a variety of viewpoints: social, religious, artistic, sexual, psychological, technical, and above all architectural.

Now in board book! The story of a boy who discovers a whale in his pool one hot summer day.