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Around the House and In the Garden: A Memoir of Heartbreak, Healing and Home Improvement.
 
 

Around the House and In the Garden: A Memoir of Heartbreak, Healing and Home Improvement. [Kindle Edition]

Dominique Browning

Print List Price: £12.99
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Product Description

Review

Jay McInerney author of "Bright Lights, Big City and Bacchus and Me: Adventures in the Wine Cellar" Anyone who has ever owned a house, planted a bulb, or lost a lover should read this book -- a collection of pensees that form a striking, imaginative whole, like the rooms of a well-loved and thoughtfully decorated home. Dominique Browning has written a beautiful, haunting, and inspiring book.

Product Description

For six years, House & Garden editor-in-chief Dominique Browning has written a monthly column that weaves together personal stories and tips about home decorating, gardening, and raising children with universal themes of domestic life. In Around the House and in the Garden, Browning adapts and expands these well-loved pieces, adding dozens of new essays, to create an insightful and moving narrative about the solace and sense of self that can be found through tending one's home.

From bedrooms and bathrooms to gardens and trees, from the importance of a couch in the kitchen to the spiritual role of a grand piano, Around the House and in the Garden reveals the intimate relationship between home and self. Browning illustrates the ways her domestic needs, instincts, and arrangements have reflected major changes in her family life. Considering her own divorce, she focuses on how grief inhabits a room: "When I was divorced my sense of home fell apart. And so, too, did my house." Eventually, attention to her home helped to mend her heart, and the attention to her heart helped her to tend her home.

Brimming with warmth, knowledge, and the useful decorating and gardening tips that have made House & Garden a favorite for one hundred years, Around the House and in the Garden is a book for anyone who has ever felt the need to reinvent a life or a space, who has ever fallen in love with the idea of home -- the place where we reinvent ourselves, "the place where we have the final word about what goes where,...what feels comfortable, what is life-enhancing...a place that gives us strength to go out and embrace the world."


Product details

  • Format: Kindle Edition
  • File Size: 206 KB
  • Print Length: 220 pages
  • Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0743225953
  • Publisher: Scribner (18 May 2002)
  • Sold by: Amazon Media EU S.à r.l.
  • Language English
  • ASIN: B003YCOTT4
  • Text-to-Speech: Not enabled
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #253,376 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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More About the Author

Dominique Browning
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:  14 reviews
22 of 22 people found the following review helpful
a love song 24 July 2002
By Parinaz Bahadori - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover
I have always loved the writing of Dominique Browning and turn to her letter from the editor in House and Garden as soon as I receive the magazine in the mail! The book contains a few of those essays (a pleasure to reread them) and many other reflections on her life in her two homes. The houses come to symbolize the state of her heart and mind and Ms. Browning weaves in her other thoughtful musings throughout these sometimes disconnected essays.

I would recommend this book to all who love their home and garden and derive strength and solace from the pleasures of creating beautiful and comfortable homes. The book is honest without being a tell-all. While maintaining the privacy of her ex-husband and sons, Ms. Browning opens up her heart to the reader. I often thought of the symbol of a bird's nest - she herself seemed like a bird who is left to tend to her young in a nest until they are strong enough to fly off on their own. In many ways this book was really a love song to her sons. Perhaps because I have two sons of my own, I really identified with the author's emotions: the raw love of her boys mixed with the desire to have them share her deepfelt sensitivity toward the objects, smells, textures and sounds that surround us in the places we call our home.

I recommend this book with the small caveat that it does not contain a neat plot or storyline, but instead, is a series of thoughtful essays - some a tad depressing, but all very beautifully written. A few of the essays could have been tweaked a bit more as they got redundant, but that is just a quibble!

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful
On Sheltering The Heart and Soul...... 8 Sep 2002
By Renee - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover
I found this book to be just a wonderful collection of essays about the connections between home and spirit and recommend it highly who is currently in the process of trying to merge or re-merge the two. It especially speaks to women who are starting over in their lives after a divorce but could be just as useful to all women attempting to create some kind of spiritual retreat in which to nurture their bodies and souls. After reading this book, I decided to subscribe to Ms. Browning's House and Garden magazine so I would have the opportunity to enjoy a new essay of hers on the topic of home and life once a month. Her style of writing very much reminds me of Anna Quindlen's. For anyone else who enjoyed Dominique's book, you might also want to read "When A Woman Takes an Ax to A Wall: Where Is She Really Trying To Go?" by Allegra Bennett.
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful
At last! Someone who gets it! 22 Jun 2003
By Susan Spilecki - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover
In her essays on life in a home, Dominique Browning, editor of House & Garden, offers her own intensely personal experience with the ways in which the home environment affects and is affected by divorce, self-esteem, and vice versa.

Her descriptions of her rooms, her struggle to find a good living room couch (after successfully finding a kitchen sofa), her explanations of plants and flowers to her young sons, all create the feeling that you are on the phone with an old friend working to describe her evolving life. Her deep understanding of the ways in which our environments affect us (for better, for worse, just like marriage) leads the readers to feel like the changes we've been tempted to make might just be logical after all.


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