No Walls Of Stone

They also will discover emotional insights capable of enhancing their own lives: Finding new truths as old as the Greeks.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "A memoir as fierce, freewheeling, and passionate as her music." --O, the Oprah magazine A memoir by the celebrated singer-songwriter and social activist Ani DiFranco In her new memoir, No Walls and the Recurring Dream, Ani DiFranco recounts her early life from a place of hard-won wisdom, combining personal expression, the power of music, feminism, political activism, storytelling, philanthropy, entrepreneurship, and much more into an inspiring whole. In these frank, honest, passionate, and often funny pages is the tale of one woman's eventful and radical journey to the age of thirty. Ani's coming of age story is defined by her ethos of fierce independence--from being an emancipated minor sleeping in a Buffalo bus station, to unwaveringly building a career through appearances at small clubs and festivals, to releasing her first album at the age of 18, to consciously rejecting the mainstream recording industry and creating her own label, Righteous Babe Records. In these pages, as in life, she never hesitates to question established rules and expectations, maintaining a level of artistic integrity that has inspired and challenged more than a few. Ani continues to be a major touring and recording artist as well as a celebrated activist and feminist, standing as living proof that you can overcome all personal and societal obstacles to be who you are and to follow your dreams.

There once may have been 250,000 miles of stone walls in America's Northeast, stretching farther than the distance to the moon. They took three billion man-hours to build. And even though most are crumbling today, they contain a magnificent scientific and cultural story-about the geothermal forces that formed their stones, the tectonic movements that brought them to the surface, the glacial tide that broke them apart, the earth that held them for so long, and about the humans who built them. Stone walls layer time like Russian dolls, their smallest elements reflecting the longest spans, and Thorson urges us to study them, for each stone has its own story. Linking geological history to the early American experience, Stone by Stone presents a fascinating picture of the land the Pilgrims settled, allowing us to see and understand it with new eyes.

This text shows how to build a wall using the traditional method of dry stone masonry in which carefully selected stones are properly stacked and held together without mortar. As well as being beautiful, a dry stone wall is stronger, more stable and more resistant to climate than a mortared wall. More than 100 full colour photographs of walls, bridges and decorative garden elements in various steps of construction are presented as well as illustrations that show the steps and cross sections that highlight the building methods.

For this stunning new volume, photographer William Hubbell has turned his lens toward New England's ubiquitous stone walls. Beginning with the basic geology of the region and why New England has so many darned rocks, he presents a chronological overview of the varying styles and methods of wall building, and includes conversations with six contemporary wall builders. The result is a surprising and refreshing look at stone walls and at the history of New England.

"Far from being a travelogue, these beautiful black-and-white photographs portray the wall in landscape, the wall as abstract form, and the return of rocks to nature. Cook is fascinated with the juxtaposition of stones and geometric composition, as well as with the resonance betweens walls of different cultures. The walls photographed range from 1600 BC to the present time. With a tribute from Wendell Berry and essays providing a context for the walls of each region, this collection captures something fundamental about the relationship of human beings to the land."--P. [2] of dust jacket.