HOUSE-RELATED READS FOR THE HOLIDAY SEASON

The holiday season is upon us, twisting our brains with the usual worries about what to give our loved ones. Fortunately, a book is one-size-fits all gift, and even more fortunately, there are a few new ones out on home-related topics that are worth giving:

"Manspace," by Sam Martin (Taunton, 2006). For the red-meat-eater on your list, this book focuses on guyspace, the few places left over in a home once the females finish decorating -- areas like garages, spare bedrooms, unfinished attics and outbuildings. So what do these men do with these spaces? Why decorate them, of course, and sometimes quite cleverly (one fellow put a concrete climbing wall in his home office; another a boxing ring in his garage). But not all of the décor drips testosterone: for instance, one man put a red velvet couch in his stable-turned-photographer's studio and trimmed the eaves with fleur-de-lis gingerbread. In all, a book that's funny and imaginative enough to pull the reader away from ESPN, at least for a little while.

"Where We Lived," by Jack Larkin (Taunton, 2006). Like all good coffee table books, this tome has fabulous pictures -- in this case, dozens of photos of early American houses, ranging from tumbledown shacks to mansions, taken from the Historic American Building Survey, a project launched during the Depression to help out-of-work photographers. But unlike most coffee table books, this offers fascinating text as well as an exhaustively researched, yet never boring glimpse at how Americans lived just a few generations ago. When Mr. Larkin, a historian and professor, describes how an 18th-century gentleman visitor suffered living with 12 other people in the four-room house of his host, we can almost hear the loom rumbling and clacking, smell the stench of rarely-washed bodies in close quarters and feel the lice crawling. But while Mr. Larkin doesn't shy away from the most delicate topics, like outhouses and chamber pots, he always handles them with warmth and humor. For instance, he writes this about chamber pots, which were often given as "bawdy wedding presents": "It has earthy verses on both sides that clearly celebrate married sexuality, a green ceramic frog climbing over the top, and a painted face on the bottom exclaiming, 'Oh Dear Me! What Do I See?' and 'Keep Me Clean and Use Me Well, and What I See I Will Not Tell.'"

"Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives," by John Edwards (Collins, 2006). Yes, he's probably running for president, and yes, writing a heartwarming book about one's humble origins has become a rite of passage for presidential hopefuls...but that doesn't negate the fact that this is a heartwarming book. That's partly because the former Senator from North Carolina hasn't kept the spotlight on himself. Instead, like a certain former Senator from Massachusetts who also wrote a book before running -- successfully --for president back in the '60s, Mr. Edwards shifts the focus to others like John Glenn, Maya Lin and Steven Spielberg, all of whom have contributed chapters on their early memories of home.

Not surprisingly for a politician, Mr. Edwards' own memories aren't very colorful or revealing ("for me, home isn't the little two-bedroom brick house in Seneca on Mountain View Road; it's my mother crying as I leave for my first day of school..."). But many others are, and some, like that of musician Nanci Griffith's memories of her grandfather's house, are hilarious and worth the price of the book: "Every day my grandfather would have sardines and pinto beans for lunch. Sometimes after lunch he would tell my grandmother he was taking me to the library. We'd head downtown to Sixth Street, which back then was all old piano bars and domino parlors. When I started school and he took me to the actual library, my first reaction was 'This isn't the library.'"

-- November 20, 2006

By June Fletcher

Real Estate Journal Online