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David and Micki Colfax

It's an idea everyone has had at least once: give up the job, give up the home in the burbs, buy some land and live the good life in the country. Can it really be done? David and Micki Colfax did it. And in this fascinating book they tell how they did it--from their decision to try a life of self-sufficiency in the redwood forested mountains of northern California to the process of building their own house, from the demands of teaching their four children at home (three. Out of the four children went on to attend Harvard) to living without electricity, a phone, or a steady income. The Colfaxes, urban professionals whose backgrounds were in teaching and academia, moved to forty-seven steep acres of trees and hard ground in Mendocino County in 1973. They had no experience with homesteading and none of the do-it-yourself skills it would require. They learned by doing, plunging into their new life with enthusiasm, a limited amount of cash, And high hopes. By the time the first winter snows came bursting through the walls of their still uncompleted home, the Colfaxes were finding out just how challenging the good life could be. Everything took longer than they planned. The work was hard--bone-numbing hours upon hours of clearing the brush, burning stumps, hauling water, fixing the truck, and preparing food over a gas stove. The land, although breath-takingly beautiful, was harsh. In describing the setbacks, Money woes, and disasters, the Colfaxes show how their new life and their Shining Moon Ranch slowly took shape: how crops began to grow, how the house was finally made weather-tight, and how their children learned to read and write at the same time that they learned to raise prizewinning livestock. The Colfaxes have written a personal history that is as instructive as it is entertaining. Hard Times in Paradise is the story of a modern pioneer family--funny, sad, and, Most of all, uplifting. As David and Micki Colfax and their four sons discovered, the ultimate meaning of being a pioneer is to rely on--and to cherish--one another.

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Lee Hill

"He was the hipster's hipster, the perfect icon of cool. A small-town Texan who disdained his "good ol' boy" roots, he bopped with the Beats, hobnobbed with Sartre and Camus, and called William Faulkner friend. He was considered one of the most creative and original players in the Paris Review Quality Lit Game, yet his greatest literary success was a semipornographic pulp novel. For decades, the crowd he ran with was composed of the most famous creative artists of the day. He wrote Dr. Strangelove with Stanley Kubrick, Easy Rider with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, and worked on Saturday Night Live with a younger, louder breed of sacred cow torpedoers. He's a face in the crowd on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (the guy in the sunglasses). Wherever the cultural action was, he was there, the life of every party - Paris in the '50s, London in the swinging '60s, Greenwich Village, and Big Bad Hollywood. Brilliant, dynamic, irrepressible, he enjoyed remarkable success and then squandered it with almost superhuman excess. There was, and ever will be, only one Terry Southern.". "In a biography as vibrant and colorful as the life it celebrates, Lee Hill masterfully explores the high and low times of the unique, incomparable Terry Southern, one of the most genuine talents of this or any other age. Illuminating, exhilarating, and sobering, it is an intimate portrait of an unequaled satirist and satirist whose appetite for life was enormous - and whose aim was sure and true as he took shots at consumerism, America's repressive political culture, upper-class amorality, and middle-class banality.". "But more than simply the story of one man, here is a wide-screen, Technicolor view of a century in the throes of profound cultural change - from the first chilly blasts of the Cold War and McCarthyism to the Vietnam era and the Reagan years; from Miles and Kerouac to the Beatles, the Stones, and beyond. And always at the center of the whirlwind was Terry Southern - outrageous, unpredictable, charming, erudite, and eternally cool; a brazen innovator and unappreciated genius; and most of all, A Grand Guy."--BOOK JACKET.

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Philip Levine

"Philip Levine's The Bread of Time is an amalgam of celebration and quest. It celebrates the poets who were his teachers - particularly John Berryman and Yvor Winters, whose lives and work, Levine believes, have been misunderstood and misinterpreted. As the book progressed to include an account not only of his own childhood and young manhood in Detroit but also of his middle and later years in California and Spain, Levine realized that he was also striving to discover "how I became the particular person and poet I am." The resulting memoir is a double-edged revelation of the way writers grow. Witty, elegantly rendered in a prose as characteristically Levine's as his verse, it is superb - and essential - reading for everyone interested in contemporary poetry and poets."--BOOK JACKET.

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written and

Grandfather and his dog Roo are off to Australia to find long-lost Uncle Vincent. Grandfather's letters home tell the story of their extraordinary and immensely funny adventure.