Books about Tending from Amazon.com

Chickens are hot! There's a chicken-farming boomlet on the rise, with upscale urban and suburban homeowners from every part of the country ordering fancy breeds of chickens, hiring architects to build elegant chicken coops in their backyards, and signing up for classes on how to raise a happy, healthy flock in a small space.

Now Barbara Kilarski, a woman with a passion for poultry, offers a handbook that is as practical and encouraging as it is witty and entertaining. THE TOWN & COUNTRY CHICKEN provides the detailed information every aspiring chickenkeeper needs to know.

Like home-grown vegetables, home-raised chickens put us in touch with our rural past, give us a sense of self-sufficiency, and provide food - eggs! - for the table that is a lot tastier than anything we could find at the supermarket. And chickens are fun! Like dogs, they bond with their owners, and like kids, they do the darnedest things.

Kilarski regales the reader with tales spotlighting the joys of raising chickens, while at the same time explaining the nitty-gritty details of how to be a successful chicken keeper.

Any way you look at it, chickens are a star of the domestic household. They are easy and inexpensive to raise, they don't need much living space, and they provide eggs for free. No dog or cat on the planet can make the same claim..
Price: $8.17 [Notify me when price goes down.]

While living in a remote Missouri farmhouse-and struggling to care for her husband, baby, and aging grandmother-Kate Bowman finds inspiration in the pages of her grandmother's handmade journal....
Price: $2.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In an increasingly fragmented and disconnected society, dogs are often treated not as pets, but as family members and human surrogates The New Work of Dogsprofiles a dozen such relationships in a New Jersey town, like the story of Harry, a Welsh corgi who provides sustaining emotional strength for a woman battling terminal breast cancer; Cherokee, companion of a man who has few friends and doesn’t know how to talk to his family; the Divorced Dogs Club, whose funny, acerbic, and sometimes angry women turn to their dogs to help them rebuild their lives; and Betty Jean, the frantic founder of a tiny rescue group that has saved five hundred dogs from abuse or abandonment in recent years.

Drawn from hundreds of interviews and conversations with dog lovers and canine professionals, The New Work of Dogs combines compelling personal narratives with a penetrating look at human/animal attachment, and it presents a vivid portrait of a community—and, by extension, an entire nation—that is turning to its pets for emotional support and stability in a changing and uncertain world..
Price: $7.44 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Updates his classic, Spiritual Friend

Spiritual direction pioneer Tilden Edwards here shares the wealth of twenty years of experience he's gained since his classic book, Spiritual Friend. The fresh and insightful result covers both spiritual and practical sides of the art, from the nature of the soul to recommendations on payment rates. Both directors and directees benefit from this wholistic look that considers all of the person and not just his or her prayer life. At the book's heart, though, is spiritual direction at its best. Edwards examines new methods to nurture the soul, ways to recognize a true spiritual experience, and suggestions for being truly present during the process. Practical guidelines are also given for getting started with new directees, running group spiritual direction, evaluating sessions, and setting up a spiritual director peer group. In addition, Edwards gives a brief history of this special ministry and a view of its future. He also considers spiritual companionship in other religious traditions and their relation to a Christian framework. This new title offers enormous insight and support for both spiritual directors and directees, anyone considering entering spiritual direction, and all those ministers--from pastors to Christian counselors--who so often unexpectedly find themselves in the role of spiritual director..
Price: $10.12 [Notify me when price goes down.]

From the bestselling author of Seasons of Your Heart and A Tree Full of Angels, a lyric, loving, and inspiring approach to communion with God based on Benetictine spirituality.

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Price: $6.90 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"God is mystery," writes Norvene Vest in the Introduction to Tending the Holy, "and every form of religion is an effort to respond faithfully to the mystery of God by whatever name. The Divine breaks through into human experience in many ways, and humans respond variously to the awesome experience of God." And those various responses are what the contributors to Tending the Holy document.

In this provocative and cutting-edge collection readers are given the opportunity to see what spiritual direction looks like--and what questions are asked--through a variety of lenses. From an examination of the spiritual direction relationship in the Evangelical Christian tradition, to Buddhism and Hindu ones, to the better-known ones of the Benedictines, Carmelites, and Ignatians, and finally, to the contemporary lenses of feminism, Generation X, the institutional perspective, and even one based on the natural world and the spirituality of St. Francis, this collection explores unexplored territory. Tending the Holy is an important resource for spiritual directors and pastoral counselors..
Price: $14.23 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The story of a small garden large enough to hold everything in life that really matters


“These days the portion of Eden for which I am responsible is fairly modest. . . . It is a small house in a small garden in a small neighborhood But it is large enough . . . Large enough to hold everything dear.”

Digging In tells the story of the author’s move into an early twentieth-century cottage with a long abandoned back yard, and the work that he and his family had to do to bring a garden to life there. It is the story of the way that the garden became the ground upon which deeper relationships with his family, friends, and neighbors began to blossom and grow.

Written in the gentle, revealing prose for which Benson is acclaimed, this is a lyrical and wise book, beautifully evoking the wonder of planting and seasons, humorously recalling the challenges and the struggles of the labor itself, and carefully observing the simple truths and timeless joys that were there to be found..
Price: $1.60 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The wildfires that spread across Southern California in the fall of 2003 were devastating in their scale-twenty-two deaths, thousands of homes destroyed and many more threatened, hundreds of thousands of acres burned. What had gone wrong? And why, after years of discussion of fire policy, are some of America's most spectacular conflagrations arising now, and often not in a remote wilderness but close to large settlements?

That is the opening to a brilliant discussion of the politics of fire by one of the country's most knowledgeable writers on the subject, Stephen J. Pyne. Once a fire fighter himself (for fifteen seasons, on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon) and now a professor at Arizona State University, Pyne gives us for the first time a book-length discussion of fire policy, of how we have come to this pass, and where we might go from here.

Tending Fire provides a remarkably broad, sometimes startling context for understanding fire. Pyne traces the "ancient alliance" between fire and humanity, delves into the role of European expansion and the creation of fire-prone public lands, and then explores the effects wrought by changing policies of "letting burn" and suppression. How, the author asks, can we better protect ourselves against the fires we don't want, and better promote those we do?

Pyne calls for important reforms in wildfire management and makes a convincing plea for a more imaginative conception of fire, though always grounded in a vivid sense of fire's reality. "Amid the shouting and roar, a central fact remains," he writes. "Fire isn't listening. It doesn't feel our pain. It doesn't care-really, really doesn't care. It understands a language of wind, drought, woods, grass, brush, and terrain, and it will ignore anything stated otherwise."

Rich in insight, wide-ranging in its subject, and clear-eyed in its proposals, Tending Fire is for anyone fascinated by fire, fire policy, or human culture.

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Price: $4.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]