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 House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco, by Suzanna Clarke [$15.00 paper] – The Medina -- the Old City -- of Fez is the best-preserved, medieval walled city in the world. Inside this vibrant Moroccan community, internet cafes and mobile phones coexist with a maze of donkey-trod alleyways, thousand-year-old sewer systems, and Arab-style houses, gorgeous with intricate, if often shabby, mosaic work. While vacationing in Morocco, Suzanna Clarke and her husband, Sandy, are inspired to buy a dilapidated, centuries-old riad in Fez with the aim of restoring it to its original splendor, using only traditional craftsmen and handmade materials. So begins a remarkable adventure that is bewildering, at times hilarious, and ultimately immensely rewarding.
A House in Fez chronicles their meticulous restoration, but it is also a journey into Moroccan customs and lore and a window into the lives of its people as friendships blossom. When the riad is finally returned to its former glory, Suzanna finds she has not just restored an old house, but also her soul.
 Gingerbread Architect: Recipes and Blueprints for Twelve Classic American Homes, by Susan Matheson, Lauren Chattman [$22.50 hardcover] – What happens when an architect who is also an avid baker gets together with a house-obsessed pastry chef? Twelve classic American homes rendered in gingerbread. Are you dreaming of a colonial Christmas? Here’s your chance to build a traditional Cape Cod house in freshly baked gingerbread, complete with breath-mint pinnacles, Twizzler shingles, and a brick-red fruit-leather chimney. Prefer nineteenth-century New York elegance? Why not whip up an urban brownstone, embellished with crushed butterscotch windows, Tootsie Roll staircase posts, and a front courtyard tiled in mini Chiclets. Is the Santa Fe look more your style? Try a gingerbread pueblo, landscaped with rock-candy cacti and turbinado-sugar sand. Here to guide you through every step of building your gingerbread dream house is The Gingerbread Architect, created by New York and London-based architect, Susan Matheson, and professional baker, Lauren Chattman. Featuring detailed blueprints and elevations of the houses alongside baking directions and essential construction notes, this modern guide to the traditional holiday craft of creating gingerbread houses has projects for bakers of all levels, from novice to advanced. For each house, Matheson and Chattman provide historical context and descriptions of prominent architectural features, demonstrating how to execute those characteristics in gingerbread and candy. Detailed instructions cover everything from baking and assembling the walls to piping icing and landscaping the yard. And to help match gingerbread houses to bakers–and their little helpers–each house has a difficulty rating, ranging from one gingerbread man to four. With full-color photographs of the finished houses, tips on the construction schedule, baking and candy resource guides, a glossary of architectural terms, and instructions for lighting the houses from within, The Gingerbread Architect is the complete guide to the ultimate family holiday baking project–for anyone with a keen eye and a sweet tooth.
 A Year in the Maine Woods, by Bernd Heinrich [$18.95 paper] – Escapist fantasies usually involve the open road, but Bernd Heinrich’s dream was to focus on the riches of one small place—a few green acres along Alder Brook just east of the Presidential Mountains. The year begins as he settles into a cabin with no running water and no electricity, built of hand-cut logs he dragged out of the woods with a team of oxen. There, alone except for his pet raven, Jack, he rediscovers the meaning of peace and quiet and harmony with nature—of days spent not filling out forms, but tracking deer, or listening to the sound of a moth’s wings. Throughout this year when “the subtle matters and the spectacular distracts,” Heinrich brings us back to the drama in small things, when life is lived consciously. His story is that of a man rediscovering what it means to be alive.
 The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed, by Michael Meyer [$25.99 hardcover] – A fascinating, intimate portrait of Beijing through the lens of its oldest neighborhood, facing destruction as the city, and China, relentlessly modernizes. Soon we will be able to say about old Beijing that what emperors, warlords, Japanese invaders, and Communist planners couldn’t eradicate, the market economy has. Nobody has been more aware of this than Michael Meyer. A long-time resident, Meyer has, for the past two years, lived as no other Westerner—in a shared courtyard home in Beijing’s oldest neighborhood, Dazhalan, on one of its famed hutong (lanes). There he volunteers to teach English at the local grade school and immerses himself in the community, recording with affection the life stories of the Widow, who shares his courtyard; co-teacher, Miss Zhu, and student, Little Liu; and the migrants, Recycler Wang and Soldier Liu; among the many others who, despite great differences in age and profession, make up the fabric of this unique neighborhood. Their bond is rapidly being torn, however, by forced evictions as century-old houses and ways of life are increasingly destroyed to make way for shopping malls, the capital’s first Wal-Mart, high-rise buildings, and widened streets for cars replacing bicycles. Beijing has gone through this cycle many times, as Meyer reveals, but never with the kind of dislocation and overturning of its storied culture now occurring as the city prepares to host the 2008 Summer Olympics. Weaving historical vignettes of Beijing and China over a thousand years through his narrative, Meyer captures the city’s deep past as he illuminates its present. With the kind of insight only someone on the inside can provide, The Last Days of Old Beijing brings this moment and the ebb and flow of daily lives on the other side of the planet into shining focus.
 Bridge of Sighs, by Richard Russo [$14.95 paper] – Louis Charles Lynch (also known as Lucy) is sixty years old and has lived in Thomaston, New York, his entire life. He and Sarah, his wife of forty years, are about to embark on a vacation to Italy. Lucy's oldest friend, once a rival for his wife's affection, leads a life in Venice far removed from Thomaston. Perhaps for this reason Lucy is writing the story of his town, his family, and his own life that makes up this rich and mesmerizing novel, interspersed with that of the native son who left so long ago and has never looked back.
"Bridge of Sighs," from the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Empire Falls," is a moving novel about small-town America that expands Russo's widely heralded achievement in ways both familiar and astonishing. |
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