A good place to live

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Terry Pindell

After living for twenty years in a picture-book New England town envied for its autumn maples and Currier-and-Ives snowfalls, Terry Pindell sensed something missing in his community and set out to find it. A Good Place to Live is his exploration of place and community in a nation where people have never stopped moving in their efforts to discover and create the two. Pindell embarks on the journey we all would like to take, identifying sixteen of his favorite places and speaking with fellow migrants and city planners about creating a good place to live. He looks at the void so common in Anyplace, U.S.A. - a lack of the kind of gathering places other societies are built around - finds home seekers who have realized they don't have to choose between natural and cultural amenities; and describes those people who are engineering the re-creation of communities with a heart, a focal point, and a strong, unique, often idiosyncratic sense of place. Against a not-so-settled national backdrop, Pindell discovers people who convince him that they have found and nurtured a good place to live.

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Ryszard Kapuściński

"Between 1989 and 1991, Kapuscinski made a series of extended journeys through the disintegrating Soviet empire, and his account of these forms the heart of the book. Bypassing official institutions and itineraries, he traversed the Soviet territory alone, from the border of Poland to the site of the most infamous gulags in far-eastern Siberia (where "nature pals it up with the executioner"), from above the Arctic Circle to the edge of Afghanistan, visiting dozens of cities and towns and outposts, traveling more than 40,000 miles, venturing into the individual lives of men, women, and children in order to understand the collapsing but still various larger life of the empire." "Bringing the book to a close is a collection of notes which, Kapuscinski writes, "arose in the margins of my journeys" - reflections on the state of the ex-USSR and on his experience of having watched its fate unfold "on the screen of a television set ... as well as on the screen of the country's ordinary, daily reality, which surrounded me during my travels." It is this "schizophrenic perception in two different dimensions" that enabled Kapuscinski to discover and illuminate the most telling features of a society in dire turmoil." "Imperium is a remarkable work from one of the most original and sharply perceptive interpreters of our world - a galvanizing narrative deeply informed by Kapuscinski's limitless curiosity and his passion for truth, and suffused with his vivid sense of the overwhelming importance of history as it is lived, and of our constantly shifting places within it."--BOOK JACKET.

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Katharine Mumford and Anne Power

"This moving book about the lives of families in London's East End gives important new insights into neighbourhood relations through the eyes of the local community. What hope is there of change? Using an up-to-date account of life in East London, the authors illustrate how cities faced with neighbourhoods in decline are changing." "Undergraduate and postgraduate students in social policy, sociology, anthropology, urban studies, child development, geography, housing and public administration should all read this book. Policy makers in national and local government, practitioners and community workers in towns and cities and general readers interested in the life and history of urban neighbourhoods will also find this book an invaluable source of information."--Jacket.

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introductions and notes by Robert E. Spiller

Emerson traveled broadly in England and Scotland in 1833 and again on lecture tour fifteen years later. Drawing on his experiences there as well as his wide reading in British history, he set forth in English Traits his view of the English as a nation. English Traits is a searching and distinctive portrayal of English culture that today offers a revealing perspective on American viewpoints and preoccupations in the mid-nineteenth century. It is notable, too, for revealing an interesting side of Emerson's complex character; here we find Emerson the practical Yankee, analyzing English power, resourcefulness, determination, and materialism.