Cheryl Mendelson – författare

Morningside Heights, a Manhattan neighborhood sandwiched between Columbia University and the Hudson River, is home to an eclectic mix of academics, struggling artists, and rooted families. In this distinctive world, Peter Frankel, a successful partner in a prestigious law firm, lives a seemingly contented life with his talented wife and his two Ivy League—educated children. Yet in middle age Peter finds himself discontent. His wife’s narrowness and her preoccupation with appearances leaves him cold, his job does not fulfill his creative bent, and he fears that his children, Susan and Louis, have grown into skeptical young adults who shun marriage and stability. So when Peter’s wife is badly hurt in a car accident and lies in a coma, he finds himself guiltily relieved–and newly drawn toward his children as they too struggle with ambivalent feelings about the mother who’s never really shown them much love. As Susan, a cerebral doctoral student, becomes unhappily involved with an aspiring playwright and Louis is caught up in a futile pursuit of an ambitious journalist, Peter’s own quiet life is shaken up, and longings he has stifled for years come rumbling to the surface.Freed from his wife’s judgments, Peter throws himself into his greatest pleasure, the work he does for a foundation that funds offbeat artistic projects. And as his passion for this work ignites, so does his desire for another woman. But the stubborn morality that has steered Peter’s life is a force to be reckoned with–and one from which he may never entirely escape.Love, Work, Children is a profoundly insightful novel about two generations and the colorful urban world they inhabit. A superb portrayal of one of New York’s exceptional neighborhoods, this is a story, ultimately, about the self-imposed obstacles to true happiness–and a testament to the joy one can find in overcoming them.From the Hardcover edition.

From the author of the bestselling Home Comforts comes a spin off of one of the most often consulted topics in the classic book on housekeeping.For Cheryl Mendelson, laundering is the best part of housekeeping. It’s full of physical pleasures—the look of favorite clothes restored to freshness and beauty, the tactile satisfaction of crisp linens in beautifully folded stacks. Good laundering preserves things you love and protects your pocketbook. It doesn’t take much time or effort. What it takes is knowledge, and Laundry is the comprehensive, entertaining, and inspiring book on the art of laundering. Culled from the bestselling Home Comforts, with revised and updated information and a new introduction, Laundry is an indispensable guide to caring for all the cloth in one’s home: from kitchen rags to bedding, hand-washables, and baby clothes to vintage linens. Mendelson offers detailed guidance on when to disregard labels, removing stains, making environmentally informed choices, sewing, and storing clothing and fabrics. A much-needed antidote to the standard-issue how-to manual, Laundry celebrates the satisfactions of ironing, folding, and caring for clothes and linens. Both pragmatic and eloquent, Mendelson provides beginning and veteran homemakers with a seamless combination of reliable instruction, time-tested advice, and fascinating personal narrative. Writing with infectious love and respect for her subject, Mendelson is sure to instill in readers a newfound affection and appreciation for the art of laundering.

A classic bestselling resource for every household, Home Comforts helps you manage everyday chores, find creative solutions to domestic dilemmas, and enhance the experience of life at home. “Home Comforts is to the house what Joy of Cooking is to food.” —USA TODAYHome Comforts is an engaging and comprehensive book about housekeeping. It is a lively and readable guide for both beginners and experts in all the domestic arts. From keeping surfaces free of germs, watering plants, removing stains, folding a fitted sheet, cleaning china, tuning a piano, lighting a fire, setting the dining room table—this guide covers everything that people might want to do for themselves in their homes. Further topics include: making up a bed with hospital corners, expert recommendations for safe food storage, reading care labels (and sometimes carefully disregarding them), keeping your home free of dust mites and other allergens, this is a practical, good-humored, philosophical guidebook to the art and science of household management.

The Good Life is an engaging, reasoned look at American values: how the angry political right hijacks and corrupts ideas about morality, how the fringe political left abandons the moral outlook, and how antimoralism from many sources results in cruelty, harsh law, dangerous irrationality, corrupt religion, greed, and gross inequality, and undermines American democracy. Cheryl Mendelson reminds us how far these trends have taken us from our roots, and how a humane democracy, with its freedoms, depends on the moral sense of its citizens.Medelson gives clear-sighted descriptions, free of ideology, of what morality really is, tracing it to its psychological roots, and of the antimoralism behind familiar cultural tics like authoritarianism, the culture of "cool," irrationalist movements in politics and religion, and the sterility of academic attempts to understand the moral life. Along the way, she gives a clear, persuasive explanation of why moral truth exists and why believing this doesn''t force us to be dogmatic and judgmental. Mendelson''s book is a bracing polemic, but it is also inspiring and, with its eye-opening analysis of the moral mentality, an education in what it means to be moral in an antimoral world.

From the author of the bestselling Home Comforts comes a spin off of one of the most often consulted topics in the classic book on housekeeping.For Cheryl Mendelson, laundering is the best part of housekeeping. It’s full of physical pleasures—the look of favorite clothes restored to freshness and beauty, the tactile satisfaction of crisp linens in beautifully folded stacks. Good laundering preserves things you love and protects your pocketbook. It doesn’t take much time or effort. What it takes is knowledge, and Laundry is the comprehensive, entertaining, and inspiring book on the art of laundering. Culled from the bestselling Home Comforts, with revised and updated information and a new introduction, Laundry is an indispensable guide to caring for all the cloth in one’s home: from kitchen rags to bedding, hand-washables, and baby clothes to vintage linens. Mendelson offers detailed guidance on when to disregard labels, removing stains, making environmentally informed choices, sewing, and storing clothing and fabrics. A much-needed antidote to the standard-issue how-to manual, Laundry celebrates the satisfactions of ironing, folding, and caring for clothes and linens. Both pragmatic and eloquent, Mendelson provides beginning and veteran homemakers with a seamless combination of reliable instruction, time-tested advice, and fascinating personal narrative. Writing with infectious love and respect for her subject, Mendelson is sure to instill in readers a newfound affection and appreciation for the art of laundering.

From the bestselling author of Home Comforts comes the “timely” (The New Yorker), “fascinating, and morally serious,” (The Wall Street Journal) story of our wedding vows—what they mean and why they still matter.In the West, marrying is so thoroughly identified with ceremonial promises that “taking vows” is a synonym for getting married. So, it’s a surprise to realize that this custom is actually a historical and anthropological oddity. Most of the world, for most of history, married without making promises. And there’s a reason for that. Marriage by vow presupposes free choice, and free choice makes a love-match possible. It is a very modern arrangement. Vows is both a moving memoir of two marriages and an “illuminating” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) meditation on marriage itself. Cheryl Mendelson tackles the sociology of commitment through our most traditional promises and shows why they endure. In considering the kind of marriage these vows entail, she helps answer some of life’s most urgent and personal questions: Could I, would I, or should I make these promises to someone? Using history and literature, the book describes the parameters of the behavior that traditional vows promise and, in doing so, answers a whole series of other questions: Why did wedding-by-vow arise only in the West? Why are they recited in weddings around the world today? Why have these vows lasted for nearly a thousand years? Why does the kind of marriage promised in the vows survive?

From the bestselling author of Home Comforts comes the “timely” (The New Yorker), “fascinating, and morally serious,” (The Wall Street Journal) story of our wedding vows—what they mean and why they still matter.In the West, marrying is so thoroughly identified with ceremonial promises that “taking vows” is a synonym for getting married. So, it’s a surprise to realize that this custom is actually a historical and anthropological oddity. Most of the world, for most of history, married without making promises. And there’s a reason for that. Marriage by vow presupposes free choice, and free choice makes a love-match possible. It is a very modern arrangement. Vows is both a moving memoir of two marriages and an “illuminating” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) meditation on marriage itself. Cheryl Mendelson tackles the sociology of commitment through our most traditional promises and shows why they endure. In considering the kind of marriage these vows entail, she helps answer some of life’s most urgent and personal questions: Could I, would I, or should I make these promises to someone? Using history and literature, the book describes the parameters of the behavior that traditional vows promise and, in doing so, answers a whole series of other questions: Why did wedding-by-vow arise only in the West? Why are they recited in weddings around the world today? Why have these vows lasted for nearly a thousand years? Why does the kind of marriage promised in the vows survive?

From the bestselling author of Home Comforts comes the “timely” (The New Yorker), “fascinating, and morally serious,” (The Wall Street Journal) story of our wedding vows—what they mean and why they still matter.In the West, marrying is so thoroughly identified with ceremonial promises that “taking vows” is a synonym for getting married. So, it’s a surprise to realize that this custom is actually a historical and anthropological oddity. Most of the world, for most of history, married without making promises. And there’s a reason for that. Marriage by vow presupposes free choice, and free choice makes a love-match possible. It is a very modern arrangement. Vows is both a moving memoir of two marriages and an “illuminating” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) meditation on marriage itself. Cheryl Mendelson tackles the sociology of commitment through our most traditional promises and shows why they endure. In considering the kind of marriage these vows entail, she helps answer some of life’s most urgent and personal questions: Could I, would I, or should I make these promises to someone? Using history and literature, the book describes the parameters of the behavior that traditional vows promise and, in doing so, answers a whole series of other questions: Why did wedding-by-vow arise only in the West? Why are they recited in weddings around the world today? Why have these vows lasted for nearly a thousand years? Why does the kind of marriage promised in the vows survive?