World as Home – serie

At midlife, Mary Rose O’Reilley writes, we are called to an “archaeology of memory”—turning over a potsherd here, a fragment there—to assemble something whole out of the messiness of experience. Excavating her own life, she traces the middle-class Irish American background that shaped her, with its mix of antic humor, terror, and mysticism, and finds meaning in the seemingly smallest, most transient encounters.But O’Reilley’s purpose is less to recount these moments than it is to find the language for a different kind of story, in which the narrative of daily life opens to admit the holy and its corollary, the comic. Encouraging all of us to contemplate our own deep story, she calls hers a demo-life, in which the facts of personal history ground a narrative of consciousness and perception.Earthy and luminous, unconventional and profoundly illuminating, The Love of Impermanent Things offers a threshold ecology for readers of all ages.

Toward the Livable City is intended for commuters, suburbanites, and city dwellers concerned about making their lives more livable and interested in knowing what that might mean. Combining first hand accounts of the attractions and distractions of city life, this book also introduces a wide range of perspectives about creating successful, livable cities, with examples from across America and around the world. The book conveys what leading thinkers—including James Howard Kunstler, Jane Holtz Kay, Tony Hiss, Phillip Lopate, Bill McKibben, Myron Orfield, and john powell, among others—say about such topics as smart growth, opportunity-based housing, traffic calming, pedestrian rights, regional planning, riverfront redevelopment, urban agriculture, and the pleasures of a saunter down tree-lined streets to restaurants, theatres, shops, with the presence of other people.The mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, closed downtown streets to cars and built bus stops that load and unload passengers with the same speed as subways. In Boston, urban agriculture produces more than 10,000 pounds of vegetables each season. Minneapolis has redeveloped its riverfront while Manhattan ponders what to do along the Hudson. With these and other examples, Toward the Livable City reveals the many benefits of parks, healthy neighborhoods, and mixed use communities.