In His Garden

From the author of the #1 bestseller Senatorial Privilege comes this shocking, true story of the crimes, investigation, and trial of Antone Costa, the Cape Cod killer. The eventual discovery of the four horribly mutilated bodies buried in a secret place in the woods that the grisly serial killer called "his garden", and the subsequent trial seized the attention of the nation and will keep readers riveted as well.

A lawyer gets inside the mind of a notorious New England serial killer in this award-winning and “grimly compelling” true crime (Kirkus). For nine months of 2003, William Devin Howell went on a killing spree in and around New Britain, Connecticut. Seven people went missing; all of their bodies eventually discovered in a wooded lot behind a strip mall. But the investigation that led to Howell’s arrest is only part of the story. Attorney and author Anne K. Howard first contacted Howell while he was serving a fifteen-year sentence for one of his murders. He was about to be charged for the remaining six. A unique and disturbing friendship between the two began, comprised of written correspondence, face-to-face prison visits and recorded phone calls. Over the course of years, Howell shared his troubled history with Howard. When his case was finally over, he told her every intimate, grizzly detail of how he became Connecticut’s most prolific serial killer. In His Garden, Howard probes the complicated mind of William Devin Howell. It is a story that explores the eternal question of human evil and its impact on others, including the woman he chose to hear his horrific confession. 2020 Independent Press Award 2018 Literary Excellence Pencraft Award

Gardening in Iowa’s Amana Colonies is the culmination of techniques that stretch back several centuries to central Europe, when adherents to a new faith called the Community of True Inspiration formed their own self-reliant communities. As a child of parents who were part of the communal life of the Amana Society, Larry Rettig pays homage to the Amana gardening tradition and extends it into the twenty-first century. Each of the seven villages in Amana relied on the food prepared in its communal kitchens, and each kitchen depended on its communal garden for most of the dishes served (the kitchens in Rettig’s hometown produced more than four hundred gallons of sauerkraut in 1900). Rettig begins by describing the evolution of communal gardening in old Amana, focusing especially on planting, harvesting, and storing vegetables from asparagus to egg lettuce to turnips. With the passing of the old order in 1932, the number of the society’s large vegetable gardens and orchards dwindled, but Larry Rettig and his wife, Wilma, still grow some of the colonies’ heirloom varieties in their fourth-generation South Amana vegetable garden. In 1980 they founded a seed bank to preserve them for future generations. Rettig’s chapters on modern vegetable and flower gardening in today’s Amana Colonies showcase his Cottage-in-the-Meadow Gardens, now listed with the Smithsonian in its Archives of American Gardens. Old intermingles with new across his gardens: heirloom lettuce keeps company with the latest cucumber variety, a hundred-year-old rose arches over the newest daylilies and heucheras, and ancient grapevines intertwine with newly planted wisteria, all adding up to a rich array of colorful plantings. Rettig extends his gardening advice into the kitchen and workroom. He shares family recipes for any number of traditional dishes, including radish salad, dumpling soup, Amana pickled ham, apple bread, eleven-minute meat loaf, and strawberry rhubarb pie. Moving into the workroom, he shows us how to make hammered botanical prints, Della Robbia centerpieces, holiday wreaths, a gnome home, and a waterless fountain. Touring his gardens, with their historic and unusual plants, will make gardeners everywhere want to reproduce the groupings and varieties that surround Larry and Wilma Rettig’s 1900 red brick house.

The personal garden book and garden calendar of Joseph Prentis, an attorney in Williamsburg, Virginia. Prentis's garden directions and advice provide us with an interesting and useful garden record. These manuscripts from eighteenth-century tidewater Virginia are a welcome addition to kitchen garden literature.

This devotional starts with page "Day 1" and ends with "Day 365," just an easy way of starting this book. Discover its simple language and expressions of admiration for God and God's creation and the truths of His word. This book of devotions and reflections is for the new believer or seasoned follower as well for the one who is just now seeking Him. I challenge all to read one every day, until all 365 have been read. Are you up to the challenge? While everyone needs to hear the good news of Christ, I reach out to the outdoors sportsmen and sportswomen. For this is my niche, and my writing of each adventure is the gift He has provided me. All through my writings of enjoyment, and as I meet my fellow sportsperson in His wild, experiencing God in His creation, in the moment, brings an awareness and/or a renewed love for the Father. Through an outdoor adventure of fishing, hunting, camping, and backpacking, a deeper understanding of His Word comes to life. As we enjoy our passions in life of the great outdoors, how amazing it is to share with others Christ and His love for them. Just as Christ taught the disciples while walking down a road or in a fishing boat, I get to share who He is with my fellow adventurers, making the connection of the outdoors with the Creator. Taking time to praise, worship, and pray while casting a line or walking a trail or waiting for the morning sun, He is there. Keeping us ready to carry Him into our everyday life.

For years, Jestine Miller Davidson wrote stunning narrative poems that encompassed her experiences as a young girl, and later a mother, in West Virginia and other areas, from 1910 until 1930. There were thirty nationally famous people from her county; however, with such beautiful language and insight into the world she lived in, Jestine's poetry will translate to readers around the English-speaking world today, and leave a lasting impression for years to come.

Can a woman ever really know herself if she doesn't know her mother? From the author of the smash-hit bestseller Firefly Lane and True Colors comes Kristin Hannah's powerful, heartbreaking novel that illuminates the intricate mother-daughter bond and explores the enduring links between the present and the past Meredith and Nina Whitson are as different as sisters can be. One stayed at home to raise her children and manage the family apple orchard; the other followed a dream and traveled the world to become a famous photojournalist. But when their beloved father falls ill, Meredith and Nina find themselves together again, standing alongside their cold, disapproving mother, Anya, who even now, offers no comfort to her daughters. As children, the only connection between them was the Russian fairy tale Anya sometimes told the girls at night. On his deathbed, their father extracts a promise from the women in his life: the fairy tale will be told one last time—and all the way to the end. Thus begins an unexpected journey into the truth of Anya's life in war-torn Leningrad, more than five decades ago. Alternating between the past and present, Meredith and Nina will finally hear the singular, harrowing story of their mother's life, and what they learn is a secret so terrible and terrifying that it will shake the very foundation of their family and change who they believe they are.

The instant New York Times bestseller | A Washington Post Notable Book | One of NPR's Best Books of the Year “Expert storytelling . . . [Pollan] masterfully elevates a series of big questions about drugs, plants and humans that are likely to leave readers thinking in new ways.” —New York Times Book Review From #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Pollan, a radical challenge to how we think about drugs, and an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants—and the equally powerful taboos. Of all the things humans rely on plants for—sustenance, beauty, medicine, fragrance, flavor, fiber—surely the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness: to stimulate or calm, fiddle with or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. Take coffee and tea: People around the world rely on caffeine to sharpen their minds. But we do not usually think of caffeine as a drug, or our daily use as an addiction, because it is legal and socially acceptable. So, then, what is a “drug”? And why, for example, is making tea from the leaves of a tea plant acceptable, but making tea from a seed head of an opium poppy a federal crime? In This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs—opium, caffeine, and mescaline—and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings? In this unique blend of history, science, and memoir, as well as participatory journalism, Pollan examines and experiences these plants from several very different angles and contexts, and shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively—as a drug, whether licit or illicit. But that is one of the least interesting things you can say about these plants, Pollan shows, for when we take them into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways we can. Based in part on an essay published almost twenty-five years ago, this groundbreaking and singular consideration of psychoactive plants, and our attraction to them through time, holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world.