Tiny Houses by Mimi Zeiger

The other day, on a walk to Prospect Park, Jenn and I ran into Mimi Zeiger, who told us her book Tiny Houses is coming out this month from Rizzoli. I’d read about the tiny-house phenomenon before in the Times, and was intrigued. Since then, Time Out New York has reviewed the book. Here’s an excerpt:

In her adorably scaled-down coffee-table book, Tiny Houses, Mimi Zeiger (the founder of the architecture zine and blog loud paper) argues that living small isn’t just ecologically sound but aesthetically pleasing. An atlas of international residences under 1,000 square feet, the book is a beautifully designed argument for the simpler life. “By making a positive impact on the environment,” the small abodes here “dream big.”

The Blue Sweater by Jacqueline Novogratz

Seth Godin, my favorite marketing guru, has been blogging about Acumen Fund for some time. A nonprofit venture capital firm, Acumen Fund invests in water, health, energy, and housing in a number of developing countries.

How much does Seth Godin like Acumen Fund? He actually released an action figure of himself to raise money for it.

The Blue Sweater, a book by Acumen Fund founder Jacqueline Novogratz, will be released tomorrow. According to Amazon, “For the first 5,000 copies of The Blue Sweater purchased, a $15 donation per book will be made to Acumen Fund, a nonprofit that invests in transformative businesses to solve the problems of poverty.” The book is subtitled “Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World.” It looks well worth checking out.

Cheever the Transcendentalist

Despite my admiration for John Cheever and Henry David Thoreau, it never occurred to me that they had much in common. The suburban family man and master of the short story, with his alcoholism and his turbulent bisexual affairs, didn’t much resemble the ascetic New England seeker of the truth who never married and (as far as I can tell) had no sex life at all. Yet Charles McGrath’s long reconsideration of Cheever in the Sunday Times draws one parallel (and reminds me that Cheever and Thoreau both kept voluminous journals—and both loved to skate).

The journals sometimes record moments of almost ecstatic joy, often occasioned by physical activity or the natural world: a rain shower, an afternoon of skating or scything (he was inordinately proud of his scything), the glint of the afternoon sun. Cheever was at heart a Transcendentalist who saw in nature a kind of numinousness: “The sky is mixed, but there is some blue, and the motion of skating, and the lightness and coldness of the air involve quite clearly for me a beauty—a moral beauty. By this I mean that it corrects the measure and nature of my thinking. Space, perhaps, is what I mean, but there is the moral beauty of light, velocity and environment.”