Bryn Mawr Alum

This feast for the senses is just the ticket for anyone who has driven through the country and wondered "Gee, what would it be like to leave the city behind, move to a place full of meadows, vineyards, orchards and forests and start growing my own food." The author's innocence optimism and perseverance invite readers to imagine themselves undertaking such an adventure and make it all seem doable. The Fiddletown Stories is escapist literature at its very finest, filled with descriptions of the unique foothills environment and the colorful characters who inhabit it.

Traverses the central thoroughfares of our cities to uncover the ways they bring together our communities

How do Main Streets contribute to our mental health? This intriguing question took social psychiatrist Mindy Thompson Fullilove on an 11-year search through 178 cities in 14 countries. As Andy Merrifield notes in the foreword, "Mindy has drifted through a lot of Main Streets, walked them, observed, talked to people, ordinary people as well as professional practitioners.

While she got to pace many miles of New York's Broadway, eat French patisseries as a flâneuse in Gay Paree, sip çay in Istanbul, and chill in Kyoto's dazzling Zen temples, her real concern is Main Street, USA, the more modest main stems of provincial America." From these visits Fullilove has discerned the larger architecture of Main Streets. She observes the ways that Main Streets are shaped for a vast array of social gatherings and processes, how they are a marker for
the integrity of civilization-and the marks aren't always good. She also looks at Main Streets as "an allée, a way that is part drama and part quotidian. While passing through, we get to look at one another, to sing, to recognize what we are, have been, might be." Her conclusion, that Main Streets are essential for gathering people and sharing information, emphasizes that tending our oft-neglected civic and commercial centers is a task worthy of us all.

With ten seemingly light, though occasionally shocking short stories, Anne Hobson Freeman carries the reader back to the joys and the fears, the yearnings and cockeyed values of assorted Virginians in the mid-twentieth-century South.

"This is not just 'outside-the-box' thinking. This is 'set the box on fire, throw it over a cliff, and start inventing entirely new shapes' thinking."

In Solve, Not Serve: What Other Nonprofit Management Books Won't Tell You, author Kelly E. Griffin proposes a long-overdue paradigm shift within the social sector. Her insights are gleaned from decades of experience as a nonprofit strategist and advisor, extensive research and analysis, and perspectives from dozens of inspirational and effective nonprofit leaders, funders, and independent thinkers.

With piercing honesty and charming wit, Griffin offers compelling ideas and strategies that provide viable solutions for solving the biggest problems our society faces today.

This guidebook will motivate employees, volunteers, and financial supporters of the nonprofit sector to:

• Define clear priorities
• Develop sustainable leadership
• Make brave decisions
• Stand up to unreasonable funder expectations
• Apply only the most relevant practices from for-profit business

Solve, Not Serve will empower and inspire you if, like Griffin, you are dedicated to making the world a better place.