Books about Nonpareil from Amazon.com

Daniel C. Beard was not only a founder of Boy Scouting in America, but also a prolific and engaging author. His great passion was making boys and girls feel at home in nature, to allow them to experience its wonders while fostering their sense of self-sufficiency and independence. The present volume introduces young people to the pleasures and challenges of camping. In it, Beard suggests any number of projects, plans, and schemes to entertain those whose travels take them into open fields and forests, who want to know everything from how to build kites and birdhouses to snow houses and snow men.

There are chapters on packing a horse, on making clothes and moccasins, on camp cooking, on building piers, boats, and sleds. As usual, the directions are clear, the diagrams simple, and the activities seductive. This is an age when the most common phrase one hears from children is "I"m bored." With this book in hand, you can send them into the smallest woodland plot and be sure they'll have an activity that will occupy them for hours, as well as projects that are not only fun to do but that actually work..
Price: $10.17 [Notify me when price goes down.]

If Tom Sawyer had been a girl, Aunt Polly would certainly have seen to it that she had a copy of this book and with a heartfelt blessing. Its a magical cornucopia of projects, devices, toys, gifts, dolls, recipes, decorations, perfumes, wax and clay modelling, oil and water-color painting and games, all with clear and practical directions for how to make and play them. Vintage Americana by the Beard sisters, two of the founders of Girl Scouting in the United States.

"In the Beard sisters' version, 'the American girl' ranges in age from eight to eighteen. Healthy and spirited, she thinks nothing of taking a ten-mile 'romp' through woods and fields with a group of friends, and collects flowers and leaves for preservation or presentation to friends and relations. Above all, however, the Beards' girl is handy. She can make a hat rack, a screen, or a bookshelf; fashion a macrame hammock or a cornhusk doll; and draw, paint, sculpt, or decorate a room.
The American Girls Handy Book, in short, by emphasizing what girls can do, presents a portrait of girlhood that is vigorous, active, and full of possibilities."
- From the foreword by Anne M. Boylan.
Price: $4.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

One of eight children, Laurie Lee was born in 1914, in Slad, Gloucestershire, then a remote corner of England As his father was absent, the large family five children from his father's first marriage and three from his second one was brought up by his capable mother. 'We lived where he had left us; a relic of his provincial youth; a sprawling cumbersome, countrified brood too incongruous to carry with him; and I, for one, scarcely missed him. I was perfectly content in this world of women . . . bullied and tumbled through the hand-to-mouth days, patched or dressed-up, scolded, admired, swept off my feet in sudden passions of kisses, or dumped forgotten among the unwashed pots.'

This beloved classic describes a lost world, a world reflecting the innocence and wonder of childhood, and illuminating an era without electricity or telephones. This is England on the cusp of the modern era, but it could have been anywhere. This may explain why Cider with Rosie became an instant bestseller when it was published in 1959, selling over six million copies in the UK alone, and continues to be read by children and adults all over the world..
Price: $9.57 [Notify me when price goes down.]

IN THIS SUITE of five short pieces -- one of the unqualified literary masterpieces of the American 1960s -- William Gass finds five beautiful forms in which to explore the signature theme of his fiction: the solitary soul’s poignant, conflicted, and doomed pursuit of love and community. In their obsessions, Gass’s Midwestern dreamers are like the "grotesques" of Sherwood Anderson, but in their hyper-linguistic streams of consciousness, they are the match for Joyce’s Dubliners.

First published in 1968, this book begins with a beguiling thirty-three page essay and has five fictions: the celebrated novella "The Pedersen Kid," "Mrs. Mean," "Icicles," "Order of Insects," and the title story..
Price: $8.88 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This is a collection of stories diverse in subject, but sutured together by the limitless affection the author holds for the land and the people of New England Donald Hall tells about life on a small farm where, as a boy, he spent summers with his grandparents. Gradually the boy grows to be a young man, sees his grandparents aging, the farm become marginal, and finally, the cows sold and the barn abandoned. But these are more than nostalgic memories, for in the measured and tender prose of each episode are signs of the end of things a childhood, perhaps a culture. In an Epilogue written for this edition, Donald Hall describes his return to the farm twenty-five years later, to live the rest of his life in the house of string.

We take pleasure in bringing back into print this classic account of boyhood summers in old New England, with the addition of an Epilogue and an album of family snapshots..
Price: $3.74 [Notify me when price goes down.]

As Bruce Bawer wrote in Bookforum, "the late Guy Davenport (1927–2005) left behind an oeuvre that is one long lesson in the history of civilization, and to read any part of it -- story, essay, or translation -- is to be enthralled by his unflagging intellectual energy and engagement " Here, in this generous collection of criticism, are pieces on Whitman, Zukofsky, Joyce, Tolkien, Ives, Wittgenstein, Greek art, Spinoza's tulips -- on everything Davenport's restless, learned mind reached out to possess..
Price: $9.32 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Originally published in 1960 selling half a million copies at the time and first reissued as a Nonpareil paperback in 1991, this immensely popular work of fiction has attracted, informed, and been embraced by a whole new generation of readers..
Price: $8.51 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Who can love the spread of canvas and the bend of the oak and not thrill to the names of the great clippers built by Donald McKay? Great Republic, Sovereign of the Seas, Lightening, Star of the Empire, and Westward Ho these names ring from an era when the windships were the queens of the ocean and sail was king. But the most famous, the one that most securely captured the hearts and imaginations of the entire nation, was McKay's masterpiece, the Flying Cloud.

Here is the story of Enoch Thacher, a boy whose father lost his fortune at sea, who McKay takes on during the lofting, building, and rigging of the Cloud, and who finally ships out on her for her maiden, record-breaking trip around the Horn. Accompanied by Sperry's wonderfully vigorous drawings, this realistic and riveting narrative will keep even landlubbers pegged to their seats..
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Like an American heiress in a tale by Henry James, Iris Origo (1902–1988) was born into a world of "unfair advantages of education, money, environment, and opportunity." She used her birthright wisely, traveling the world, studying art with Berenson, and, with her Italian husband, improving the land and the lot of the peasants in the Val d'Orcia of Tuscany. She tells her life story in Images & Shadows..
Price: $8.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

So you think you know most of what there is to kow aboyt people like Nero and Cleopatra, Allexander the Great and Attila the Hun, Lady Godica and Miles Standish? You say there's nothing more to be written about Lucrezia Borgia? How wrong you are, for in these pages you'll find Will Cuppy footloose in the footnotes of history. He transforms these luminaries into human beings, not as we knew them from history books, but as we would have known them Cuppy-wise: foolish, fallible, and very much our common ancestors.

When it was first published in 1950, The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody spent four months on The New York Times best-seller list, and Edward R. Murrow devoted more than two-thirds of one of his nightly CBS programs to a reading from Cuppy's historical sketches, calling it "the history book of the year." The book eventually went through eighteen hardcover printings and ten foreign editions, proof of its impeccable accuracy and deadly, imperishable humor..
Price: $31.53 [Notify me when price goes down.]