The Open House Centre

Chronicles the development of the Open House Centre in Bath which provides a warm welcome to all visitors whatever their needs. It is a model that it is hoped will inspire similar efforts on the part of many other church groups. Michael Lee, a member of the Iona Community, helped to create the Centre and continues to be involved in its running.

The user-friendly guide to nearly two-hundred breathtaking historic house museums across Minnesota.

Moving house has never flustered author Jane Christmas. She loves houses: viewing them, negotiating their price, dreaming up interior plans, hiring tradespeople to do the work and overseeing renovations. She loves houses so much that she’s moved thirty-two times. There are good reasons for her latest house move, but after viewing sixty homes, Jane and her husband succumb to the emotional fatigue of an overheated English housing market and buy a wreck in the town of Bristol that is overpriced, will require more money to renovate than they have and that neither of them particularly like. As Jane’s nightmare renovation begins, her mind returns to the Canadian homes where she grew up with parents who moved and renovated constantly around the Toronto area. Suddenly, the protective seal is blown off Jane’s memory of a strict and peripatetic childhood and its ancillary damage—lost friends, divorces, suicide attempts—and the past threatens to shake the foundations of her marriage. This latest renovation dredges a deeper current of memory, causing Jane to question whether in renovating a house she is in fact attempting to renovate her past. With humour and irreverence, Open House reveals that what we think we gain by constantly moving house actually obscures the precious and vital parts of our lives that we leave behind. This is a memoir that will appeal to anyone whose pulse quickens at the mere mention of real estate.

With a keen eye and ear for story, Hockey Night in Canada host and bestselling author Scott Russell chronicles a sport both exotic and familiar -- curling. Canadians have a unique enthusiasm for curling. It transcends barriers. World-class athletes curl with absolute beginners, and grandmothers and grandsons take to the ice together. There are more than a million registered curlers in Canada, and millions more tune in to watch curling events on television. The outpouring of emotion that followed Sandra Schmirler’s death revealed that curlers are counted among our national heroes. Curling doesn’t offer the excitement of other winter sports -- no thunderous body checks, no vertical leaps, no million-dollar superstars. But when Scott Russell visited curling clubs across the country, attended the Brier in Calgary and the Olympic games in Salt Lake City, and spent time with curlers, from celebrities like Colleen Jones to the unsung father, uncle and son-team who built the Eagle Hill Curling Club in Alberta, he discovered the magical allure of curling. As Canadian Olympic gold medalist Joan McCusker said of curling’s appeal: “Ordinary people doing extraordinary things is the attraction.” Open House takes us inside the world of curling, and captures the spirit and lore of the sport, the dedication and passion of its participants.

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Elizabeth Berg's Once Upon a Time, There Was You. In this superb novel by the beloved author of Talk Before Sleep, The Pull of the Moon, and Until the Real Thing Comes Along, a woman re-creates her life after divorce by opening up her house and her heart. Samantha's husband has left her, and after a spree of overcharging at Tiffany's, she settles down to reconstruct a life for herself and her eleven-year-old son. Her eccentric mother tries to help by fixing her up with dates, but a more pressing problem is money. To meet her mortgage payments, Sam decides to take in boarders. The first is an older woman who offers sage advice and sorely needed comfort; the second, a maladjusted student, is not quite so helpful. A new friend, King, an untraditional man, suggests that Samantha get out, get going, get work. But her real work is this: In order to emerge from grief and the past, she has to learn how to make her own happiness. In order to really see people, she has to look within her heart. And in order to know who she is, she has to remember—and reclaim—the person she used to be, long before she became someone else in an effort to save her marriage. Open House is a love story about what can blossom between a man and a woman, and within a woman herself.

Through a series of fascinating case studies of faith brands, marketing insider Mara Einstein has produced a lively account of the book in the commercialization of religion.