Bioshelters, ocean arks, city farming

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Oliver Heath

'Urban Eco Chic' shows how we can all recycle materials, use sustainable products and become increasingly energy-efficient in our own homes, without compromising our sense of style.

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Anne Rivers Siddons

Their lives would never be the same. Colquitt and Walter Kennedy enjoyed a life of lazy weekends, gathering with the neighbors on their quiet, manicured street and sipping drinks on their patios. But when construction of a beautiful new home begins in the empty lot next door, their easy friendship and relaxed get-togethers are marred by strange accidents and inexplicable happenings. Though Colquitt's rational mind balks at the idea of a "haunted" house, she cannot ignore the tragedies associated with it. It is as if the house preys on its inhabitants' weaknesses and slowly destroys the goodness in them -- ultimately driving them to disgrace, madness and even death.

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photography by N. Jane Iseley

Architecture has been defined as "the gift of one generation to the next." In the South Carolina Low Country the gift is a particularly precious one-a rich treasure of buildings that not only charm us with their graceful beauty, but offer us a glimpse into a vanished world of prosperous plantations and provincial aristocracy.

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Susan M. Stabile

"A renowned literary coterie in eighteenth-century Philadelphia - Elizabeth Fergusson, Hannah Griffitts, Deborah Logan, Annis Stockton, and Susanna Wright - wrote and exchanged thousands of poems and maintained elaborate handwritten commonplace books of memorabilia. Through their creativity and celebrated hospitality, they initiated a salon culture in their great country houses in the Delaware Valley. In this original and heavily illustrated book, Susan M. Stabile shows that these female writers sought to memorialize their lives and aesthetic experience - a purpose that stands in marked contrast to the civic concerns of male authors in the republican era." "Drawing equally on material culture and literary history, Stabile discusses how the group used their writings to explore and at times replicate the arrangement of their material possessions, including desks, writing paraphernalia, mirrors, miniatures, beds, and coffins. As she reconstructs the poetics of memory that informed the women's lives and structured their manuscripts, Stabile focuses on vernacular architecture, penmanship, souvenir collecting, and mourning." "Empirically rich and nuanced in its readings of different kinds of artifacts, this work tells of the erasure of the women's lives from the national memory as the feminine aesthetic of scribal publication was overshadowed by the proliferating print culture of late eighteenth-century America."--Jacket.