Peach is a highly valuable temperate fruit crop with significant consumer demand and nutraceutical benefits. This book provides comprehensive and up-to-date coverage on sustainable production processes for peach and nectarine. The latter is a natural mutation of peach that lacks fuzzy skin. It includes fundamental information to help reduce production risks for growers, improve fruit quality, and increase potential market returns, whilst addressing current emerging issues such as climate c...

From the author of How Proust Can Change Your Life, a delightful, truly consoling work that proves that philosophy can be a supreme source of help for our most painful everyday problems.Perhaps only Alain de Botton could uncover practical wisdom in the writings of some of the greatest thinkers of all time. But uncover he does, and the result is an unexpected book of both solace and humor. Dividing his work into six sections -- each highlighting a different psychic ...

A bestselling author draws on the work of one of history’s most important writers to show us how to best live life in a book that’s "delightfully original.... A self-help book in the deepest sense of the term" (The New York Times).Alain de Botton combines two unlikely genres—literary biography and self-help manual—in the hilarious and unexpectedly practical How Proust Can Change Your Life.Who would have thought that Marcel Proust, one of t...

A guide to breaking free from the enduring, and sometimes damaging, behavioral patterns we learned in childhood.As we try to navigate the complexities and anxieties of adulthood, considering our childhoods can feel like a daunting task. They happened so long ago; we can probably barely remember, let alone relate to, the little person we used to be. But one of the most powerful explanations for why we struggle as adults is that we were denied the opportunity to full...

A dazzling and generously illustrated journey through the philosophy and psychology of architecture and the indelible connection between our identities and our locations.One of the great but often unmentioned causes of both happiness and misery is the quality of our environment: the kinds of walls, chairs, buildings, and streets that surround us. And yet a concern for architecture is too often described as frivolous, even self-indulgent. In The Architecture of ...

A wise and utterly original book of travel essays from an international bestselling author that will “give one an expansive sense of wonder” (The Baltimore Sun).Any Baedeker will tell us where we ought to travel, but only Alain de Botton will tell us how and why. With the same intelligence and insouciant charm he brought to How Proust Can Save Your Life, de Botton considers the pleasures of anticipation; the allure of the exotic, and the value of ...

A practical guide to knowing yourself.Socrates summed up all philosophical commandments with one directive: "Know yourself." Self-knowledge informs not only our identity, but how we make decisions in life, work, and love. Society has no shortage of people and organizations offering to guide us to distant places, but very few will help us with the far more important task of traveling around the byways of our own minds. This book takes us on a journey into our deepes...

Many of us are quiet geniuses at the art of procrastination. We tend to feel so guilty about everything we haven't done yet (and the hours frittered away as though we were immortal), we never get around to reflecting on why we delay and how we might do so less o en. It seems as if we have procrastinated too much to deserve a new start. Far from it. As this book shows, procrastination isn't a weird affliction we alone have been cursed with: it's a fascinating and solvable design-flaw of the...

Confidence is a skill that anyone can learn.Despite the confidence we build over time in our field of work, we tend to overlook the primordial need for a more free ranging variety of confidence - one that can serve us in the course of our everyday lives: speaking to strangers at parties, asking someone to marry us, asking someone on the train to turn down their music, changing the world.This is a guidebook to confidence, why we lack it, and how we can gain ...

Alain de Botton has performed a stunning feat: he has transformed arcane philosophy into something accessible and entertaining, useful and kind. Drawing on the work of six of the world’s most brilliant thinkers, de Botton has arranged a panoply of wisdom to guide us through our most common problems.From the frustration of misplacing your keys to the sadness of losing a loved one, the writings of Seneca can offer consolation. For the agony of not having enough money, Epicurus has a ...

A fresh approach to matters of the heart, Relationships offers practical skills and new attitudes for a more mature vision of love.Since around 1750, we have been living in the era of Romanticism, which has shaped the way we approach love, marriage, and sex. When it comes to love, this book argues, Romanticism has been a disaster.Full of real-life examples, lively humor, and cultural anecdotes, Relationships teaches us:That l...

A practical guide to making wiser, more informed choices in love.Finding and choosing a partner is one of the most consequential decisions we will ever make. This guide explains everything from why we have "types" and how our early lives inform our romantic decisions as adults. It sheds light on harmful and repetitive patterns and provides insight on how to break them.Drawing on in-depth analysis, How to Find Love explains our instinct for romantic...