The classic bestselling resource for every American home. Choosing fabrics, cleaning china, keeping the piano in tune, making a good fire, folding a fitted sheet, setting the dining room table, keeping surfaces free of food pathogens, watering plants, removing stains -- "Home Comforts" addresses the meanings as well as the methods of hands -- on housekeeping to help you manage everyday chores, find creative solutions to modern domestic dilemmas, and enhance the experience of life at home.
Further topics include: Making up a bed with hospital corners, Expert recommendations for safe food storage, Reading care labels (and sometimes carefully disregarding them), Keeping your home free of dust mites and other allergens, Home safety and security, A summary of laws applicable to the home, including privacy, accident liability, contracts, and domestic employees and more in this practical, good-humored, historic, philosophical, even romantic, guidebook to the art of household management.

For Cheryl Mendelson laundering is the best part of housekeeping. It's full of physical pleasures -- the look of favorite clothes restored to freshness and beauty, the tactile satisfaction of crisp linens in beautifully folded stacks. Good laundering preserves things you love and protects your pocket book. It doesn't take much time or effort. What it takes is knowledge, and "Laundry" is the comprehensive, entertaining, and inspiring new book on the art of laundering.

Culled from the bestselling "Home Comforts, " with revised and updated information and a new introduction, "Laundry" is an indispensable guide to caring for all the cloth in one's home: from kitchen rags to bedding, hand-washables, and baby clothes to vintage linens. Mendelson offers detailed guidance on when to disregard labels, removing stains, making environmentally informed choices, sewing, and storing clothing and fabrics. A much-needed antidote to the standard-issue how-to manual, "Laundry" celebrates the satisfactions of ironing, folding, and caring for clothes and linens. Both pragmatic and eloquent, Mendelson provides beginning and veteran homemakers with a seamless combination of reliable instruction, time-tested advice, and fascinating personal narrative.

As a farm girl in Pennsylvania, Mendelson -- who is a philosopher, lawyer, and professor, as well as a homemaker, wife, and mother -- received a classic domestic education from her grandmothers, aunts, and mother. "Laundry" combines the best of the traditional lore they taught her with the latest in technical and scientific information. Writing with infectious love and respect for her subject, Mendelson is sure to instill in readers a newfound affection and appreciation for the art of laundering.

Morningside Heights, a Manhattan neighborhood sandwiched between Columbia University and the Hudson River, is home to an eclectic mix of academics, struggling artists, and rooted families. In this distinctive world, Peter Frankel, a successful partner in a prestigious law firm, lives a seemingly contented life with his talented wife and his two Ivy League--educated children.
Yet in middle age Peter finds himself discontent. His wife's narrowness and her preoccupation with appearances leaves him cold, his job does not fulfill his creative bent, and he fears that his children, Susan and Louis, have grown into skeptical young adults who shun marriage and stability.
So when Peter's wife is badly hurt in a car accident and lies in a coma, he finds himself guiltily relieved-and newly drawn toward his children as they too struggle with ambivalent feelings about the mother who's never really shown them much love. As Susan, a cerebral doctoral student, becomes unhappily involved with an aspiring playwright and Louis is caught up in a futile pursuit of an ambitious journalist, Peter's own quiet life is shaken up, and longings he has stifled for years come rumbling to the surface.
Freed from his wife's judgments, Peter throws himself into his greatest pleasure, the work he does for a foundation that funds offbeat artistic projects. And as his passion for this work ignites, so does his desire for another woman. But the stubborn morality that has steered Peter's life is a force to be reckoned with-and one from which he may never entirely escape.
Love, Work, Children is a profoundly insightful novel about two generations and the colorful urban world they inhabit. A superb portrayal of one of New York's exceptional neighborhoods, this is a story, ultimately, about the self-imposed obstacles to true happiness-and a testament to the joy one can find in overcoming them.

"From the Hardcover edition."

Following the tremendous success of her first book, a nonfiction work on housekeeping that became a surprise bestseller, Cheryl Mendelson brings to her debut novel the same intensely readable style that made Home Comforts so popular. In the spirit of Anthony Trollope, she roots her story very much in a specific time and place--1999, in an old-fashioned New York City neighborhood that's becoming rapidly gentrified--and the enormously engaging result resembles a twentieth-century version of The Way We Live Now.
Anne and Charles Braithwaite have spent their entire married life in a sedate old apartment building in Morningside Heights, a northern Manhattan neighborhood filled with intellectual, artistic souls like themselves, who thrive on the area's abundant parks, cultural offferings, and reasonably priced real estate. The Braithwaites, musicians with several young children, are at the core of a circle of friends who make their living as writers, psychiatrists, and professors. But as the novel opens, their comfortable life is being threatened as a buoyant economy sends newly rich Wall Street types scurrying northward in search of good investments and more space. At the same time, the Braithwaites weather the difficult love lives of their friends, and all of the characters confront their fears that the institutions and social values that have until now provided them with meaning and stability--science, religion, the arts--are in increasing decline. Though the group clings to the rituals and promises of such institutions, the Braithwaites' imminent departure sends shock waves through their community. As the family contemplates the impossible--a move to the suburbs--their predicament represents the end of a cultured kind of city life that middle-class families can no longer afford.
This intelligent and captivating social chronicle is the first of a trilogy of novels about Morningside Heights; readers sure to be drawn in by Mendelson's habit-forming prose have much more to look forward to.

"From the Hardcover edition."