Explains, illustrates criteria and techniques used by the Shakers to design, construct and finish the furniture and crafts for which they are admired. Over 250 photographs and measured drawings for over 80 classic designs, ranging from a sugar scoop to a peg-leg footstool to a Harvard trestle table. 262 halftones. 140 black-and-white line illustrations.

With modern age come progress, technology and the manifestation of wonderful things. But it has also brought a couple of other not so rightful things like distance, self-absorption and a deep feeling of disconnection with each other. It's a price that some say is needed to pay for such an advance—something never before seen in the history of mankind. Others believe in a new opportunity to redefine ourselves and connect once more with our inner self,...

In 1971, a property speculator named Harley Mann begins recording his life story onto a reel-to-reel machine. Reflecting on his childhood in the early twentieth century, Harley recounts that after his father's sudden death, his family migrated down to Florida's swamplands--mere miles away from what would become Disney World--to join a community of Shakers. Led by Elder John, a generous man with a mysterious past, the colony devoted itself to labor,...

"1790s, Maine. In the depths of winter Hortense, a midwife, disappears after attending a birth in the woodlands. During the search Will Rees finds her struggling through the snow and woods without shoes or a coat. Hortense claims to have been kidnapped, but Rees and his wife Lydia are suspicious. After two young men begin stalking the community in search of her - including targeting Rees's own family - it is agreed her presence is endangering everyone's...

A Kentucky Shaker village seems just the place for China to get some much-needed rest and relaxation. And getting a chance to assist with a local herbal workshop is exactly the kind of thing China relishes. Meeting with the kindly villagers, China might rightly suspect that her peaceful surroundings would be the last place on Earth to happen upon violence. But when a death occurs, China's only chance to solve the crime may lie in the history of the...

After being orphaned during the influenza epidemic of 1918, eleven-year-old Lydia Pierce and her fourteen-year-old brother are taken by their grieving uncle to be raised in the Shaker community at Sabbathday Lake. Includes author's note about the Shakers.

They have no witnesses. They have no case. With this blunt observation, Mariann Colby-an attractive, church-going Shaker Heights, Ohio, mother and housewife-bet a defense psychiatrist that she would not be convicted of murder. A lack of witnesses was not the only problem that would confront the State of Ohio in 1966, which would seek to prosecute her for shooting to death Cremer Young Jr., her son's nine-year-old playmate: Colby had deftly cleaned...

Ilyon Woo's The Great Divorce is the dramatic, richly textured story of one of nineteenth-century America's most infamous divorce cases, in which a young mother single-handedly challenged her country's notions of women's rights, family, and marriage itself. In 1814, Eunice Chapman came home to discover that her three children had been carried off by her estranged husband. He had taken them, she learned, to live among a celibate, religious people known...