Sadly, because so many boys and girls have been good this year, your children's elf is being conscripted into toy construction duty by Santa. Luckily, here to suppress high jinks from the high emotions of your children is The Fairy in the Air. Unlike the elf, it doesn't report bad behavior to Santa. It hangs in your house to hear the good things your children have done each day. Children report each good deed, kindness, or politeness to the fairy.As a counselor, I truly believe tha...

For more than the first twenty-five years of its time span, this book focuses on the interaction between Dick and nature. It took more than two and a half decades, plus the development of the Internet, for Dick to find Sandy. For the past fifteen they have been partners in life.The subtitle refers to a symbiotic relationship. A symbiotic relationship is one that is mutually beneficial. But for billions of years, nature got along just fine without the human species. Isn't it presump...

In our around-the-world travels we visited bathrooms ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous and, becoming fascinated with the variety, I began a photo collection. I combined the photos with descriptive rhymes and hope they convey the fun this particular set of experiences had for me. This facet of travel is often overlooked and underrated, so in appreciation of the varied and wonderful bathroom experiences one can have in busy cities or very remote areas, I have written this tribute. W...

A "delightful, witty" memoir about starting over as a beekeeper in the Ozarks ( Library Journal).Alone on a small Missouri farm after a thirty-year marriage, Sue Hubbell found a new love—of the winged, buzzing variety. Left with little but the commercial beekeeping and honey-producing business she started with her husband, Hubbell found solace in the natural world. Then she began to write, challenging herself to tell the absolute truth about her life and th...

In You Are Here, astronaut Chris Hadfield creates a surprisingly intimate and compelling visual essay about the planet we live on, choosing the best from the thousands of photos he took on the International Space Station.Chris Hadfield's new book shows us our home—our city, country, continent, our whole planet—from a unique perspective. The millions of us who followed Chris's Twitter feed from the ISS thought we knew what we were looking at when we saw his ...

Anyone eager to master survival skills for outdoor vacations, or simply to find a fun new family activity for a Saturday afternoon, will be educated and inspired by the practical advice presented here by archaeologists, anthropologists, primitive practitioners, craftsmen, and artisans. These experts help modern readers rediscover the skills that have served humanity for millennia: fire-making, camp cooking, basket weaving, pottery making, animal tracking, and much more. You can even learn ...

Travelers are showing a huge interest in the fast-growing sector known as "experiential" tourism—vacations that encompass heritage, culture, nature, ecology, and soft adventure. In the footsteps of the briskly selling The 100 Best Vacations to Enrich Your Life featuring North American destinations, our new title extends these ardent travelers' sights to global scale. From helping to build a health clinic in Tanzania to learning massage in Thailand to aiding green turtle conservation in Bel...

“Banks’s narrative seductively juxtaposes rambles through lush volcanic mountains, white sand beaches and coral reefs with a barrage of memories of the hash he’s made of his private life.” —The New York Times Book ReviewRussell Banks has indulged his wanderlust for more than half a century. This longing for escape has taken him from the “bright green islands and turquoise seas” of the Caribbean islands to peaks in the Himalayas, the Andes, and beyond....

From the author of the #1 bestseller The Why Café, comes this much anticipated next work. An inspiring and emotionally powerful story set amidst the mystery, beauty, and allure of Africa.Jack is a young man struggling to find happiness in his life. Although he doesn’t know why, the one image that seems to capture his soul is that of Africa. With solitary focus, he saves for two years and then embarks on a journey to find the source of the calling he has felt.Halfwa...

Adventurous essays by Meghan Daum, Paul Theroux, Sarah Moss, and many more, selected by New York Times–bestselling author Padma Lakshmi."The beauty of good writing is that it transports the reader inside another person's experience in some other physical place and culture," writes Padma Lakshmi in her introduction, "and, at its best, evokes a palpable feeling of being in a specific moment in time and space." The essays in this edition of The Be...

Easy-to-follow, step-by-step demonstrations in acrylic, watercolor and oilInside, you'll learn how to create realistic wildlife paintings, step by step, mastering dozens of specific wildlife textures, including:• Fur of a bobcat, American bison, snow leopard cub and wolf• Feathers of a wood duck, white-throated sparrow and northern shoveler• Scales of a trout and sunfish• Ears of a cottontail rabbit, white-tailed deer and red fox...