Product Description: It is 1962. The first avocado pears are appearing at the greengrocers, people are thinking about carpeting their lavatories and boxing in their banisters, and Ronnie Glover, housepainter, husband and father, is feeling the first vague stirrings of discontent with his life...read more

Of the many books about the American experience of Paris, Laurie Graham's In Other Words is noteworthy not only for its elegance and charm, but for its depiction of how a place gains meaning when viewed through the prism of language. When Graham bought her apartment in Paris, she saw the tiny pied-à-terre as an extension of her love for the French language, a physical place that would make the language real. In this series of six related essays, Graham takes the reader on an intimate tour of her Paris. With humor and a lively eye for detail, she describes her search for just the right apartment and, later, her anxieties about the building's soundness; her encounters with her very French neighbors; her thoughts on fitting in ; and, most alarming, her husband's emergency trip in the wee hours of the morning to Cochin Hospital, as he lay delirious and coughing up blood. But never far from the story is the joy to be found in words. Woven into her tales of Paris is a fascinating and lighthearted rendering of the sounds, the vocabulary, and the structures of the French language that will delight both students of language and the Francophile general reader. Laurie Graham was an editor at Scribner's for eighteen years and is the author of Rebuilding the House, a New York Times Notable Book, and Singing the City: The Bonds of Home in an Industrial Landscape. In this new book, she shows us a way to look at Paris and language that sheds new light on why so many of us love this great city and the pleasure to be found in living in other words. The book contains 12 drawings.

In a fictional diary, Maybell Brumby, a wealthy, young American widow, records the efforts of her best friend, Wallis Simpson, to land the world's most eligible bachelor, Edward, the future king of England.

From bestselling author Laurie Graham comes the late-life diaries of the Kennedys' fictitious nanny: an inside look into the early years of the Kennedy dynasty—with all the juicy bits intact.When Nora Brennan, fresh to America from Ireland, lands herself a position as nursery maid to a family in Brookline, Massachusetts, she little thinks it will place her at the heart of American history. But her job is with the Kennedy family, so how could it not? Nora has charge of all nine Kennedy children, practically from the minute they're born. She sees the boys coached at their father Joe's knee to believe everything they'll ever want in life can be bought. She sees the girls trained by Rose Kennedy ("Herself") to be good Catholic wives. With her sharp eye and her quiet common sense, Nora is the perfect candidate to report on an empire in the making.World War II changes everything. When war breaks out, Nora and the Kennedys are in London, where Joseph Kennedy is the American ambassador. His reaction is to send the entire household back across the Atlantic to safety, but Nora, surprised by midlife love, chooses to stay in England and do her bit for the war effort. Separated from her Kennedys by an ocean, she nevertheless remains the warm, approachable sun around which the older children orbit: Joe Jr. and Jack, both serving in the US Navy; Rosemary, tragically unable to fit into the Kennedy mold; and Kathleen, known affectionately as "Kick," who throws a spanner in the Kennedy works by marrying an English Protestant. Dear Nora has a deliciously inside view of everything that is happening upstairs, and in this fictional diary she tells all with the humor and candor that only a nursemaid dare employ.Witty, irreverent, and a rollicking good read, The Importance of Being Kennedy is social satire at its best.

From the author of The Future Homemakers of America comes the hilarious and moving story of one unstoppable woman's unforgettable ride through an ever-changing century . . . Poppy Minkel has kinky hair, big ears, sallow skin, and an appetite for fun. Her mother despairs of ever finding her a husband, despite the family fortune. But from one World War to the next, from New York to Paris, Poppy invents her own extraordinary life with never a moment of self-doubt.

A Featured Alternate of the Literary Guild, the Doubleday Book Club, and the Book-of-the-Month ClubThis warm, funny, often moving novel spans forty years in the friendships of a group of five women who meet as young Air Force wives and mothers stationed in Norfolk, England, in 1952 and set out to make the most of their overseas mission.

Product Description: Bobs and Ba live in happy prosperity. They have children, grandchildren and a chain of car repair yards. But on a Caribbean holiday to celebrate Bobs' fiftieth birthday, it becomes clear he is a man with things on his mind. As the gossip starts at the golf club and the kids stop calling, Ba's life is turned upside down...read more

Product Description: From the author of The Dress Circle, this is a bittersweet comedy about Birdie, who lives on chocolate bars and yearns for action, or at least, for the re-opening of the dance hall. When the estate boils over, Birdie gets more action than she expects.

Product Description: In an East End high-rise, Birdie Gibbs lives on chocolate and yearns for action, or atleast for the reopening of the old Imperial dance hall. When one of her ex-husbands, Jimmy Dwyer, appears from nowhere and disappears again, leaving a greyhound in need of homing, Birdie's memories of the War are revived, a time when she did her bit...read more

A powerful and revealing journey into America's industrial heartland offers a uniquely focused history of Pittsburgh, showing the living traditions of its neighborhoods and discussing how the decline of industrial towns and jobs has an impact on American life today. UP. (view table of contents)

Examines American auto workers' performance and attitudes in Indiana's non-union Subaru-Isuzu plant, which employs Japanese management techniques

A personal account of widowhood and passage through grief describes Graham's sorrow over the death of her husband, publishing executive George Schieffelin, her move to a New Jersey farmhouse, and the restoration process that helped her cope with grief