Home Books

Wow! I just got this amazing new book written by members of Austin's Rhizome Collective. It's full of highly practical, affordable, and simple designs that can be used by anyone to achieve sustainability in their home, neighborhood or community. There are a number of books on sustainable living, but this one stands apart from the rest - the systems described in it are innovative and unique, many of which I've never come across in any other book. The author's approach to sustainability and permaculture is especially important as they emphasize the interconnectedness between sustainability and social justice, a perspective that is sorely lacking in the movement. Many books sell sustainability as a product, and lead us to believe that our problems can be bought away. Not this one, it cuts away at all that greenwashing propaganda and promotes a genuine, radical sustainability that is accessible to the majority of the people in the world. The introductions to each section are very interesting, giving a general overview of each of its five main sections: Food, Water, Waste, Energy, and Bioremediation (a topic I've never seen covered in anything other than dense,academic texts). The writing is highly informed and intelligent, yet down to earth and accessible.
One of the most standout features of the book is its incredible artwork - done masterfully by Juan Martinez of the Beehive Collective - the book's many vivid illustrations and helpful diagrams make it a joy to read and look through. Highly recommended!

This book mostly explains how to reduce your mortgage payments, but since I only have car payments for now, I applied the concept to that instead. After doing the math - I'm now able to pay my loan off in 10 months instead of 3 years, and I'll be saving over $9,700!!!!

This book is worth WAY more than $25.00, it's saved me thousands...

I learned about this in January 2007. I started using the concepts and the software in February 2008. I've paid all my revolving credit off and have started reducing the principal on my primary mortgage. I'm so grateful for what this has done for me that I've started holding free, no catch, no strings, no solicitation seminars to teach people the concept. This concept does two things: 1. helps you come to terms with your household cash flow 2. takes that knowledge and teaches you how to pay off all your debts (credit cards, loans and mortgage). The concept is based on math. It will cost you nearly nothing to try, you'll get immediate results, and if you don't like it you can stop and you will have lost nothing - not even the cost of the book or software because if you try the system just once - you will have saved so much in interest it will have more than paid for all costs! Can you tell I love this book?

This book is a must read for anyone who would like to have their home paid for in less time with less interest. Step by step instructions to help you use the banks money to your advantage.

If you are a homeowner or thinking of becoming a homeowner, you simply must read this book. The concepts introduced in this book go against what we've all been traditionally taught about repaying our mortgages. It can also help you pay your mortgage off in record time. It's a quick and easy read and can potentially save you thousands of dollars in interest and give you years of mortgage free living.

A great concept but the book doesn't show you step-by-step how to implement it; Instead it just encourages you to purchase the authors subscription-based software. My wife and I have implemented these ideas and found them highly effective. However, they are also highly risky concepts if you don't have total control over your budget. Otherwise you could end up in even more debt than you began with.

If you are planning to sell your home, this book is a must. Lots of excellent suggestions laid out in a step by step process. This would be a great resource for real estate agents to give to their listing clients as well.

This book has well organized ideas for completely readying your home for selling indoors as well as out! Many are common sense, but the psychological reasons for potential buyers to buy your home over another are amazing! It would be a pain to live long-term in a home that has been completely staged for sale, but for that purpose the ideas are terrific! I highly reccommend this book for anyone thinking of placing a home on the market, or anyone that may someday, as the ideas for color and upgrades can be lived with long-term!

I always hear people talk about "staging" and wondered what it was. This is a good beginner's guide, and will hopefully give some ideas to sellers to help them in this slowing market. It had some things I hadn't heard on HGTV before, and some were more detailed instructions on following through with ideas I've seen on TV. It also gave you details on which tricks were still in use, which ones (like baking brownies right before someone shows up) were no longer fashionable and why.

This book is great! Especially in today's real estate market, your house has to stand out from the crowd, and this book gives you the tools to make that happen. The authors give you general tips for the whole house, then a room-by-room section helps you fix up each room to its best potential. Lots of before-and-after photos help you visualize what you need to do.

"De-clutter" is a regular drumbeat that goes through this whole book, and we seriously did that. The result was that nearly all of our potential buyers commented on how clean the house was. Well yes, it was clean, but the appearance from the de-cluttering was more important in causing the look of cleanliness.

A psychological plus for us: after the staging, the house was now just a house, no longer our beloved home. That may sound negative, but it helped us see a low offer for the house not as an insult, but just as a starting point in negotiating for this object. We could be much more objective in the selling process.

Was this book responsible for four offers on the house in one week? Can't know, but we're sure it helped. Also, We thought enough of this book that we recommended it to our real estate agent after the house sold, for her other clients who might need it.
- Bill McGann, Author of The Story of the Tour de France

I was very disappointed in the photos...they're all in BLACK N' WHITE!
I think that seeing things in color would have made this book more interesting and useful. One photo was describing a pink bedspread...I sure didn't get the whole picture at first and then tried to imagine what the rest of the room was like. And my Gosh! One photo displayed a black (I think it was black) sexy nightgown laying out on the bed as part of staging? Staging for what?!? I think that could embarass the buyer! And they were worried about offending someone with having a bottle of wine out! Save your money! There are plenty of other books out there where someone could afford to have it published in color.

I'm 66 years old and have been a carpenter (structural and finish) all my life. Being semi retired I'm now doing a lot of rustic furniture and antique reproductions. I wish I had this book about 40 years ago. I could have eliminated "OOP's" from my vocabulary. The book is explicit in explaining how to read wood so that you choose the proper pieces for your project. It's required reading if you don't want your finshed piece to warp, crack, shrink or generally go south.

This book had a lot of information that I personally didn't need, but lacked some that I wanted. Most noteably wood identification. It presents an entire section on this topic, but only shows microscopic views of different species, which is pretty useless to me. The author assumes that if you're reading this book, you can look at almost any piece of wood an identify it, thus making a pictorial directory of wood almost beneath the sofistication of this text.

It is a well written book if you want to understand the science of wood. Think of it as an anatomy & physiology for wood. I would have given it a 5, but ommitting normal pictures of wood types seems to easy to have been left out.

good service, could have been a bit faster and there was a small tear in the dust cover. otherwise nothing to complain, can and will recommend this!

I would consider myself new to woodworking, but not a complete novice. I have read a few books about the principles of woodworking, and all of them contained very little information about the nature of wood. These books left me with many questions about why certain methods are used or when to use one method over another. Understanding Wood answered a lot of my questions. Most importantly I now understand how to take into consideration the nature of wood when I am planning a project. The most important thing that I learned in this book was about the importance of moisture content. Sure I knew that wood expands or contracts with humidity levels, but now I know how to plan for it and work with it and I also know how detrimental it can be if you don't consider the relationship between water and wood.

What I really liked about the book is that the author did not pull any punches in his exposition meaning that this is not written for someone who prefers a "for dummies" book. This is the real deal, it contains some equations, it has many tables and graphs. Don't be too intimidated though, because it is not as dense or dry as a standard textbook. I think for anyone who enjoys woodworking this would be a great read.

My only complaint is that I wish the author could've gone into more detail on a lot of the subjects. He often wrote that a detailed discussion would fill a whole other book or even volumes. The problem is he's right, so the trade off is that some information is left out since the book can't be thousands of pages long.

If you want to get to the "next level" in woodworking, this book will help you get there. Good all around read on the properties of the various species , but written from a woodworkers perspective. Covers species identification, kiln drying, steam bending as well as adhesives and finishing. Practical knowlege and a very good resource. If you want to move from building birdhouses to fine furniture, you'll want to buy a copy of this book.

Three favorite editions in one slipcased gift collection! From the popular "LIFE" Picture Puzzle series comes a three-volume set of "LIFE Picture Puzzle, LIFE Original Picture Puzzle," and "LIFE Amazing Picture Puzzle."

These picture puzzles are great. They are very challenging and fun. It would have been nice if they told you that there were 3 books in the set and listed the names of the books that were included since I already had a few of the Time Life Picture Puzzle books. Overall I was very pleased with my purchase.

When I purchased this item, it came at the time that it was said to come. When I gave it to my friend, he was like AWESOME. He loved the diffrent levels from novie to genius levels and the timing feature on this made it fun for himself as well as others that competed with him and that was just the first book out of 3 that were included. A good deal for the price. He also loved looking at all the different pictures. They were from all over the world and some of them very funny to look at. Another friend saw it and said, Wow, that's a really nice gift.

I purchased the box set for someone who enjoys these puzzles in magazines and they were thrilled with it. Enough to keep all age levels busy for a long time!

These puzzles are very addictive and fun. I would recommend them to anyone. They also help you look at photography in a much different way. As an amateur photographer and digital artist it really helps to hone in on detail.

PhD...hmmmmm....why is the daugther and not the mother writing the review. The daughter has no actual experience with the material and is only second hand passing on what her mother has claimed to be true.

I personally, as a homeschooling mother of 10, have heard nothing bad, but only good about Saxon math, and my personal experience with it so far is fine.

It is a matter of what the child works best with in my opinion as I have have used Saxon, BJU, ABeka and OTC math ciriculums with each of my children as I taught. I have good friends who will use nothing else.

It works very well, so do not be thrown off by one second hand PhD opinion. Probably she is in the same NEA group that thinks homeschooling dumbs down kids anyway.

My mother is a Ph.D. in mathematics and taught Jr. and Sr. High math for several years before moving up to teach college math. She has been pretty vocal that the only math text that will result in imparting a poor understanding of mathematical concepts--a false sense of mastery while using it, but poor retention after--is Saxon. She says that every time she has a home schooled student who is really struggling at the college level and they say "But I did so well in math before!" and they are traumatized at the level of tutoring help they need to make it in college, they all have in common the fact that they learned math using Saxon texts in high school.

After she impressed this on me, I was really leery about choosing jr. & sr. high school curriculum a couple years ago and asked her to go to me with convention to help me pick something out. She said, "You are good at math and a good teacher. Just pick something you like that is NOT SAXON!" I'm not exaggerating. It's the spiral learning method that they use. It doesn't give enough thorough practice of all the variations of a particular concept before moving on and too heavily relies on review throughout. That seems to impedes long-term retention. She thinks the fact that it is so dull and methodical is also ridiculous in this day and age of fabulous graphics and the trend to make math more interesting and multi-modal for the average student who doesn't love math.

I find it interesting that on their website, of the 6 research studies of their curriculum, only one includes high school; the other five utilized k-8 or 6-8 curriculum. Maybe all that dry rote learning makes a student test better. But the sad part is when it comes to taking that learning and building on it, they don't really understand the concepts behind it and can't apply future learning to what they simply practiced over and over but don't really know. Kind of like cramming for a test by going over everything you've learned right beforehand and blocking everything else out until you take the test and then POOF! everything you repeated over and over in your head beforehand just seems "gone" once you go back to normal habits of thinking/doing and you stop all that repetition.

I have to say that I had a good experience with Saxon mathbooks. The explainations were great for kids learning on there own, when (ie homeschoolers) the subject is commonly one that a parent tends to be least able to confidently guide and instruct their child. The critical review I just read seems qualified by "PhD... etc", however I do know many people who benefitted from the Saxon math line of texts. Retention and learning methods do vary among student after all, and perhaps the instructor referred to encountered students who had not gone far enough into subsequent texts.

The Saxon Algebra 1/2 and 1 are good for providing very easy to understand explainations to students needing help. In my case (and apparently my son's as well) they are also great sources for advancing self-study on your own when they want to challenge themselves. Perhaps that doesn't qualify him as prepared for advanced college concepts, but when the child is age 10, and typically bored/unchallenged at school... it gives them a great guide to develop further at home.

I must also comment on the suggestion made by Ms. Shirley that there is not enough practice (but at the same time too much review?) in Saxon... hogwash! There are plenty of exercises throughout. And I haven't found anything dull or mehodical about the texts, and learning didn't POOF away. On the contrary, I've never read a better written self-instructed textbook. Furthermore, the criticism of research studies focussing on K-8 is unfair and "ridiculous"... this is where kids should be learning basic algebra!

Ms. Shirley's review seems to impede the understanding that this is Beginner's instruction.
Homeschooling instruction (and the level of advancement) is often very inadequate in math, but that is a seperate issue you cannot use as proof against the publisher. Our reviews are both subjective just like styles of learning.

This book is full of clear, common-sense talk, just the thing I needed when I bought it. Dealing with an aging parent can be tricky in the best of circumstances, and at worst can threaten the whole family structure. The level-headed advice in this book can help to keep things on track, and can help family members to develop the best plan for dealing with their particular situation, as it did with us.

I did a "speed-read" of the book in the 24 hours before a family conference. I did note a fair amount of repetition of ideas in the book, but that is not necessarily a bad thing: if you're reading just the chapters that seem most relevant, then that's where those ideas need to be mentioned. One bonus: reading the book made it clear to me that I need to be doing some elder planning for myself, and with my own children, to make things easier for them later.

"Am I doing the right thing?" Every adult child of a family member requiring eldercare asks this question. The Complete Eldercare Planner will help today's busy caregivers with medical, financial, and personal issues by condensing hours of research into a concrete plan of action. In one volume, readers will learn about emergency preparedness; how to tell when your elder needs help; talking about sensitive subjects; sharing the care; long-distance assistance; money and legal matters; health and wellness; insurance; housing; safety; transportation; maintaining quality of life; aging with a disability; death and dying; and more.

This carefully designed guide also presents material in an unusually accessible way, with dozens of checklists, step-by-step mini-planning guides, lists of low-cost/free resources, website index, questions to ask with places to write down answers, spaces to record elder's vital medial, financial, and personal information, and more.

For those who have been, or will be, managing the health and financial welfare of your elderly parents, this book provides very helpful and detailed guidelines on how to do this with tact and compassion, as well as providing numerous resources. I ordered copies for all of my siblings. Best resource I found on the subject.

7-22-05 -- Recently I found myself along with 3 other siblings and spouses thrust into new uncharted waters in a totally new season of our lives. Suddenly and without any training we were and continue to this day having to take care of my aging parents. I for one will freely admit that as a child I was never trained, prepared, nor exceptionally gifted to undertake such a task. It is just not the type of thing that you can ever really get to a line and say ready...set...go...and do it very well. Elderly health care in 2005 does not always afford us the luxury of any long preparation either emotionally or financially.

Suddenly unmercifully and usually without warning you hear over the phone in the midst of a busy American routine those words you dread. It's Cancer, a stroke, or replacement surgery, just minor or major operations which means weeks of homecare and hospitalization's, etc., You are suddenly no longer swinging a few bats warming up in the on deck circle there in safety at a bit of distance. But you find yourself thrust into the batters box. You are no longer the stand by just in case fill in player who dressed for the game just in case you would or might be needed. But suddenly with a phone call, you find yourself thrust without any prior warning into the batters box. You are to take charge with 3 others voices and votes, your parents primary healthcare.

Now, if you call a frantic call for "HELP" in the middle of the night when just the week before things were okay a warning, well then, you're doing better than we were. You find yourself suddenly up at the plate with bases loaded, two outs, bottom of the ninth your teams behind 3 runs. To top it off you're facing a 94mph fastball pitcher who also throws a mean slider called the reality of life. You have never been good at hitting these kinds of pitches. Much less being the homerun hitter the team needs at this moment and are all looking to you now for. Then you hear through your wife there is a book available on just such a thing. It allows you to calmly and logically check out all of your options. It tells you in simple language just how you go about walking through this difficult mine field you've been thrust into without training or any real prior warning. It tells you how to do this without losing your mind, your family unity, and most of all your parents dignity.

I found myself literally reading the pages of Joy's, "Elder Care" wonderful "How TO" book on the plane going headed to Florida. I was then going there for my Dad's 80th B-day party as well as a visit to help out for 10 days at my elderly parents. Little did I know then, that I would see those 10 days turn suddenly into 46 long and hectic days I ended up spending there. Little did I realize as I paged through this how to book on Elderly Care that it would be like a daily Bible to me. I was literally reading a chapter ahead of the events as they unfolded in the next days. It was giving me the answers to question I had not yet asked, but found myself doing so in the next days to follow.

As a former Eagle Scout, USMC SGT., Police Officer, Business owner, 20 years as a Lay Minister and being Happily Married to the same woman for over 26 years now, I'd received lots and lots of great training. Even you will have to admit that this background covers a lot of diversified and really good training. But nothing, absolutely nothing, but my Faith prepared me emotionally, physically, or all of us financially for the events that would suddenly and totally unwelcomed show up in the middle of the night. They just seem to attack you without ceasing on these issues when it's "Your Mom or Dad."

Thank you Joy, for the time it must have taken you and the wealth of information this book contains. I personally know that it was truly a Godsend at a time of crisis in our lives. It still today continues to guide us along these slippery slopes. But because of this well timed work of Mercy and Grace, we have maintained as a family, and continued to allow my parents their Dignity and somewhat their independence. I believe this book will help answer the question of the heart on elderly care and give you practical and timely information to steer you to through the minefields of elderly care life. You should have a copy on the shelf in your own homes and be reading it now, if your parents are near or reaching retirement age.

We waited and it caught us totally by surprise. But it didn't catch Joy by surprise...I personally believe that she was obedient to the Spirit of God to produce this work for a time such as this. Our generation will Thank Her one day I believe for her unselfish actions in writing this Elder Care "How To Bible" for the uniformed. The Word of God says that "...my people perish for a lack of knowledge..." I believe that this book is full of knowledge that will help us all in our moments of crisis and bring life and health to all who read it.

Thanks for listening to my lengthy review and a very special Thanks to You Joy. You just keep on writing Joy and we will keep getting filled with the great knowledge we all need and can practically use for our loved ones. God Bless you and again... Thank you from our families hearts to yours.

God Bless You,
David D. Spaulding

My mother in law needs so much care and we had no clue on what to do. We bought this book and we bought the 36-Hour day. We are completely sure now that we are making the right choices because of the tips in both of these books. I recommmend this book highly.

Great little book that cuts through the crap:) and shows some very practical and workable designs. I use large scale open-front bins, made of wood, so that I can use the front bucket on my tractor. Our composted barn bedding, horse manure, chicken guts, and other "stuff", is like magic on our pastures and around our immature Live Oaks, etc. When we lived in the burbs I composted grass clippings and was kicking myself for not starting it years before. I just made a 4 cornered bin using t-posts and hardware cloth (wire). It was 4' square by 3' high. We put all our grass clippings and fall leaves in it and by early winter the pile was less than a foot high. This was from a half acre lot with a lot of trees, but the bin was in a fairly sunny spot. The only thing extra that I did was a couple of times I put a layer of twigs on top so that a little air could circulate after the next batch of stuff was added. Go ahead and go for it! You'll be glad you did! Good luck!

These little Storey pamphlets are always worth the money, and this one is no exception. Loaded with ideas and clear drawings for making your own composters.

it came in good time & package was good too.

Since I was in a hurry and did not read the description of this purchase I paid $3.95 for what I thought to be a book. This is a pamplet.

It really does not "show" you how to build composters with verbal descriptions instead of detail diagrams.

If your child need a bit of help with math, this book will help. my child used and she improved, of course you have to help.

This is a well written book. The problems are generally easy and hence gives a boost to student's self-confidence.

Excellent 36-week progrssive program. Presented in standardized testing formats. Great daily practice for kids incorporating computation, word problems, graphing, and numbers. Good workbook.

A great daily keep up workbook. It breaks down one year's math into small pieces and allow your child to do a little a day without worrying about missing anything. The standard test format makes your kid comfortable with the future real tests. Well organized good book.

To get ahead in math, my child does more than what this book offers. As a complement, if you have Internet at home, you should check out an incredible Houston community web site http://www.beestar.org. It provides quality free math exercises online every week. I signed up my daughter a year ago and we love it.