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Made for Living

Collected Interiors for All Sorts of Styles

By Amber Lewis and Cat Chen

Category: home | arts & entertainment.

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Oct 27, 2020 | ISBN 9781984823922 | ISBN 9781984823922 --> Buy

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About Made for Living

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The trendsetting designer known for her effortless style shares the secrets of the art of layering, with more than 250 gorgeous photographs of her signature interiors.   “Livability is my true north. The materials I use time and again all change with age and wear. Not only is that okay, it’s how you achieve more than a re-creation of what you’ve already seen, or what somebody else has done. You can do this, too—I promise.”—from the introduction Designing a room with all the vibes comes down to how you layer your décor. The more you can mix the elements of your room—your pillows, objects, patterns, and lighting—the more finished it’ll feel: not too new, not too old, but just right. Known for her eclectic approach that stems from her California cool, Amber Lewis trains your eye in  Made for Living,  offering friendly advice on everything from nailing that perfect shade of paint to mismatching patterns with wild abandon to choosing a stone finish for new countertops.  These pages will help you design a home that’s made to be lived in.

Also by Amber Lewis

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“ Made for Living  invites you into dreamy homes that are light, bright, and—key these days—comfortable.” — Martha Stewart Living “You’ll immediately want to buy this new book of [Amber Lewis’s] signature laid-back interiors for yourself and everyone you know.” — The Zoe Report “Made for Living  unpacks Lewis’s process for those longing to make the look their own.” — Magazine C  

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Made for Living: Collected Interiors for All Sorts of Styles Hardcover – Illustrated, Oct. 27 2020

Purchase options and add-ons

• Print length 288 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Clarkson Potter
• Publication date Oct. 27 2020
• Dimensions 21.01 x 3.1 x 26.14 cm
• ISBN-10 1984823914
• ISBN-13 978-1984823915
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About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Clarkson Potter; Illustrated edition (Oct. 27 2020)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1984823914
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1984823915
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 1.46 kg
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 21.01 x 3.1 x 26.14 cm
• #14 in Home Interior Design Style
• #29 in Decorating
• #29 in Architectural Interior Design

About the author

Amber lewis.

Amber Lewis is a seasoned interior designer and multi-hyphenate in the interiors and décor space. Grounded in a signature West Coast aesthetic that she describes as “laid back” and “understated cool,” Amber is first and foremost the founder of a full-service design firm, Amber Interiors, touting clients across the country.

Amber is also founder of Shoppe Amber Interiors, the brick-and-mortar retail shop that brings the effortless and timeless feeling of her interiors to a shoppable setting. Amber’s eclectic design approach and affinity for found objects is now available to everyone at her four California locations in Calabasas, Pacific Palisades, Newport Beach, Marin, as well as an online Shoppe.

In recent years, she has expanded her business into a successful, multi-year furniture and décor collaboration with Anthropologie, multi-year rug and textiles collaboration with Loloi, multi-year lighting line with Visual Comfort, and most recently published a best-selling interior design book, Made for Living.

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Made for Living: Collected Interiors for All Sorts of Styles

Description.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The trendsetting designer known for her effortless style shares the secrets of the art of layering, with more than 250 gorgeous photographs of her signature interiors.  

“Livability is my true north. The materials I use time and again all change with age and wear. Not only is that okay, it’s how you achieve more than a re-creation of what you’ve already seen, or what somebody else has done. You can do this, too—I promise.”—from the introduction

Designing a room with all the vibes comes down to how you layer your décor. The more you can mix the elements of your room—your pillows, objects, patterns, and lighting—the more finished it’ll feel: not too new, not too old, but just right.

Known for her eclectic approach that stems from her California cool, Amber Lewis trains your eye in  Made for Living,  offering friendly advice on everything from nailing that perfect shade of paint to mismatching patterns with wild abandon to choosing a stone finish for new countertops.  These pages will help you design a home that's made to be lived in.

About the Author

Interior designer Amber Lewis is the principal and founder of Amber Interiors, a full-service firm that provides designs for everything from large-scale residences to extensive commercial projects. Amber and her team work with architects and contractors to bring to life the distinct visions seen in her work, on her blog, and in her retail shop. Amber lives with her husband and daughter in Calabasas, California.

Praise for Made for Living: Collected Interiors for All Sorts of Styles

“ Made for Living  invites you into dreamy homes that are light, bright, and—key these days—comfortable.” — Martha Stewart Living “You’ll immediately want to buy this new book of [Amber Lewis’s] signature laid-back interiors for yourself and everyone you know.” — The Zoe Report

“Made for Living  unpacks Lewis’s process for those longing to make the look their own.” — Magazine C  

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Made for Living Hardcover – Illustrated, 27 October 2020

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 288 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Clarkson Potter
• Publication date 27 October 2020
• Dimensions 21.01 x 3.1 x 26.14 cm
• ISBN-10 1984823914
• ISBN-13 978-1984823915
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Clarkson Potter; Illustrated edition (27 October 2020)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1984823914
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1984823915
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 21.01 x 3.1 x 26.14 cm
• #11 in Interior Design Architecture
• #20 in Home Improvement & Design
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A history of hypochondria wonders why we worry

In ‘a body made of glass,’ caroline crampton writes about the ways in which society has thought about diagnosis and delusion.

In the late 14th century, a spate of patients scattered across Europe developed an unusual delusion: They came to believe that their bodies were made of glass. Those suffering from this bizarre affliction were terrified of shattering — at least one of them insisted on sleeping in heaps of straw so as to prevent any mishaps. But to modern-day hypochondriacs, this archaic phobia might represent both a fear and a perverse fantasy. A glass person would be perilously breakable, but her condition would also be blissfully transparent.

The journalist Caroline Crampton often wishes that she could see her own insides. She is as desperate for knowledge of the darkest corners of her anatomy as she is terrified of her fragility. “I am a hypochondriac,” she writes in her new book, “ A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria .” “Or, at least, I worry that I am, which really amounts to the same thing.” She has suffered from this secondary malady since she was diagnosed with the primary malady of Hodgkin’s lymphoma as a teenager. After months of treatment, her doctors assured her that she was in remission — but a year later, the disease returned. Crampton beat it again, but her anxiety lingers to this day. Is her apprehension irrational?

“A Body Made of Glass” proposes that it is and it isn’t. On the one hand, Crampton often experiences symptoms that she later recognizes to be psychosomatic; on the other, her hyper-vigilance after her supposedly successful first cancer treatment enabled her to spot a suspicious lump the second time. “My fears about health are persistent and at times intrusive,” she concedes, “but they are not necessarily unwarranted.” She concludes that “diagnosable illness and hypochondria can coexist.” Although “we tend to think of hypochondria as shorthand for an illness that’s all in your head,” the people most worried about their health are very often the people who have the most reason to be.

Unfortunately, many of us have cause to brood on the indignities of embodiment. Crampton writes that “a serious illness is much easier to cope with if it can be slotted into a familiar structure with a beginning, middle, and end,” but she knows that the comforts of recovery and resolution are denied to the ever-increasing number of patients with chronic or autoimmune conditions. Like those conditions, hypochondria is “a plotless story.”

“Without a firm diagnosis for my unreliable symptoms, I am stuck in the first scene of the drama, endlessly looping around the same few lines of dialogue,” Crampton writes. “The compulsion to narrativize this experience is always there, but always thwarted.” There is no satisfying ending, no definitive interpretation of a vague pain or a mysterious twinge.

Indeed, there is no absolute agreement about what qualifies as diagnosis and what qualifies as delusion. In a society riddled with biases, credibility is not apportioned equally, and marginalized populations are often dismissed as hysterical. A host of studies have demonstrated that doctors are less likely to listen to women and non-White people, and Crampton knows that she is “taken more seriously in medical examinations” because she is White and upper middle class. The prejudice cuts both ways: Patients, too, rely on “irrelevant details like confidence, carriage, and body language” to determine whether a physician is trustworthy.

And of course, sickness itself — and therefore hypochondria — is a culturally specific construct that is always subject to revision. The catalogue of medically reputable diseases expands and contracts as research advances and outdated theories are debunked. “It is now possible to test for conditions that were previously undetectable,” Crampton writes. The novelist Marcel Proust was regarded by his contemporaries (and even his father) as deranged because he took such strenuous precautions to avoid fits of coughing, but contemporary medicine might have vindicated his concerns. One century’s hypochondriac is another’s confirmed patient.

In 1733, the physician George Cheyne described hypochondria as a “disease of civilization.” According to Crampton, he meant that it was “a consequence of the excesses of an imperial and consumerist society that had abandoned the simplicity of earlier human existence in favor of an indulgent diet and inactive lifestyle,” but hypochondria is also a disease of civilization because it increases as our knowledge does. The more we understand about the myriad ways our bodies can fail, the more we have to fear.

Because the boundaries delineating hypochondria from verifiable sickness are not fixed, it is difficult to pin down either notion with precision. Crampton acknowledges that her topic of choice “resists definition, like oil sliding over the surface of water.” She is right that hypochondria is a shifting target, but her refusal to venture even a provisional characterization can make for frustrating reading.

“A Body Made of Glass” is a product of impressively thorough research, but it is sometimes circuitous and digressive to the point of frenzy. It blends memoir and literary criticism with micro-histories of subjects of varying relevance, among them the emergence of quack medicine and the medieval theory of the humors.

“Hypochondria” is an old word but a relatively new concept, and it is not always clear whether Crampton’s book traces the history of the phenomenon or the history of the term. Sometimes, her concern is etymological: She informs us that the word first appeared in the Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of medical tracts produced and disseminated in ancient Greece, where it referred to “the place where hard ribs give way to soft abdomen.” Elsewhere, however, Crampton discusses not language but terror in the face of mortality. Her wide-ranging reflections touch on such eminences as John Donne, Molière and Charles Darwin, all of whom had both palpable ailments and debilitating anxiety about their palpable ailments. (It’s difficult to have the former without the latter, it turns out.)

Still, “A Body Made of Glass” is full of fascinating forays. If it is hard to read for its claims or conclusions, it can still be read for its many sobering observations about sickness — a misfortune that will eventually befall even the heartiest among us. After all, as Crampton darkly notes, “hypochondria is merely the human condition with the comforting fictions stripped away. Whether we choose to think about it all the time or not, we are all just one freak accident away from the end.”

Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post and the author of “All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess.”

A Body Made of Glass

A Cultural History of Hypochondria

By Caroline Crampton

Ecco. 321 pp. $29.99

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MANIA , by Lionel Shriver

As a novelist, Lionel Shriver has made her strongest impressions selecting some hot issue of the day — school shootings, the American health care system, the ballooning of the U.S. national debt — and working it into a well-paced drama about its effects on one family. When this formula works, as it did best with “We Need to Talk About Kevin” (2003), the result can be riveting and also very popular. The intimacy of domestic politics moderates Shriver’s polemical side, which, when given free rein — as during an infamous 2016 speech she gave on cultural appropriation while wearing a sombrero — usually turns out to be smug, crude and obtuse.

In Shriver’s tiresome new novel, “Mania ,” the balance is off. “Mania” is the story of Pearson Converse, an untenured academic who lives with her tree-surgeon partner and three children in a Pennsylvania college town. Most of the novel takes place during an alternate version of the 2010s, when a social-justice fad has been ignited by a best-selling book titled “The Calumny of I.Q.: Why Discrimination Against ‘Dumb People’ Is the Last Great Civil Rights Fight.”

Pearson’s son gets sent home from school for using “the D-word,” now considered a slur. Lawn signs appear in the neighborhood announcing “We support cognitive neutrality.” Student “predators” haunt the literature course Pearson teaches at the local liberal arts college, hungrily searching for any slip-up suggesting that she thinks some people are smarter than others, so they can report her to the administration and get her sacked. Worst of all, Pearson’s best friend from girlhood, Emory Ruth, boosts her TV career by taping editorials endorsing the new ideology known as Mental Parity.

In real life, partisan rancor typically fuels culture-war initiatives like this; in Shriver’s imaginary America, it barely exists. The new ethos gets rapidly and improbably adopted by everybody in every walk of life, regardless of political affiliation. Mental Parity not only borrows from the left’s obsession with egalitarianism, safetyism and language hygiene but also draws on the right’s mistrust of expertise and credentialism; it could have bipartisan appeal if it weren’t so patently absurd.

Soon, Barack Obama is out of favor for being “outstandingly astute, eloquent and well informed,” and replaced by Joe Biden, who makes a point of installing a Treasury secretary who’s “not only an imbecile but an imbecile who was recognizably an imbecile — someone whose speech and affect were conspicuously vacuous.” Similar incompetents are ordered to take out Osama bin Laden, a failed mission that leaves him free to bomb the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum.

Pearson’s partner, Wade, is forced to hire an assistant who knows nothing about arboriculture and drops a branch on him. Because medical degrees are “now handed out as carelessly as shopping fliers,” a young surgeon botches the ankle surgery his injuries require. Then Wade nearly dies after untrained nurses administer the wrong medication and is saved only by a doctor in his 50s, a relic from the good old days who has the temerity to know what he’s doing.

It goes on and on. Cars blow up because they’re built by idiots. Shrewd consumers import their food from overseas to avoid poisoning from unsafe American goods. Any word or phrase ever used as a synonym for “intelligent” (“quick,” “deep”) or stupid (“meatball,” “simple,” “dense”) must be purged from daily usage even when denoting a different meaning. If you want to order a wooden board at a hardware store, you have to ask for one that’s “two inches fat.” Mensa is “the kind of cerebral-supremacist organization” deemed “the greatest threat to American civic order” by no less than the F.B.I. Most fantastically, a child protective services investigator arrives at Pearson’s home because her youngest child reported her mother describing her as less intelligent than her siblings. “Use of language of such a derogatory character with minors,” this pious emissary states, “is classified as child abuse” and “potentially grounds for removing a child to foster care.”

As parody goes, this is ham-fisted stuff. Ironically, “Mania” lacks the discernment required to make it work. Satire demands precision, and Shriver applies an ax to a job calling for a scalpel. Although Shriver has made writing unlikable protagonists into a sort of cottage industry, Pearson is something more, a preeningly self-righteous didact swathed in false modesty about her own supposedly mediocre brain. Like many of Shriver’s narrators, Pearson often speaks or narrates with the sort of affected, antiquated vocabulary of a stock character from a 1930s movie, the portly gentleman in a white three-piece suit, up to no good and puffing on a cigar, played by Sidney Greenstreet. She has an odd, unexplained penchant for alliteration: “At the antediluvian argot, I nearly dropped my mask of stony stoicism.” She is not so much unlikable as simply insufferable.

Pearson’s past as an apostate of the Jehovah’s Witnesses makes her the sworn enemy of cant, and the only language she speaks is invective, so inevitably, she runs ruinously afoul of the new dispensation. Meanwhile, Emory’s star rises. She proves herself the ideal apparatchik on camera while privately snickering with Pearson and Wade over the silliness of Mental Parity, at least at first. The most — really the only — intriguing aspect of the novel is the relationship between these two friends and Pearson’s growing realization that Emory lacks a moral center. Emory herself remains a cipher. Is she a sociopath? Or just an opportunist? If only she were the unlikable narrator to tell this story. That would constitute a stretch for Shriver, imagining the interiority of a character who’s not basically an avatar of herself. That would be a truly daring choice, and dare I say it, a smart one.

MANIA | By Lionel Shriver | Harper | 277 pp. | $30

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Book Review: ‘Nothing But the Bones’ is a compelling noir novel at a breakneck pace

This image released by St. Martin’s Publishing Group shows “Nothing But the Bones” by Brian Panowich. (St. Martin’s Publishing Group via AP)

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Nelson “Nails” McKenna isn’t very bright, stumbles over his words and often says what he’s thinking without realizing it.

We first meet him as a boy reading a superhero comic on the banks of a river in his backcountry hometown in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Georgia. There, a bully picks on him and then does the same to a pretty girl Nails secretly fancies. Enraged, Nails, ignorant of his own strength, gives the bully a fatal beating.

Nails’ friend Clayton Burroughs, who watches it happen, doesn’t call the police. Instead, he calls his brutal father, Gareth, who runs the rackets on Bull Mountain, to cover it up.

So begins “Nothing But the Bones,” a prequel to the first three Southern noir novels in Brian Panowich’s critically acclaimed Bull Mountain series.

After the killing, the story skips forward nine years and finds history repeating itself. Nails, now working as an enforcer for Gareth, is drinking apple juice in a seedy bar when he sees a punk mistreating a young woman. Moments later, the punk lies dead on the barroom floor.

There are too many witnesses for Gareth to fix things this time. Instead, he hands Nails a bag of cash, orders him to head south, and gives him a phone number to call when he gets to Jacksonville, Florida. As Nails speeds away, he discovers the young woman, a fellow outcast who calls herself Dallas, hiding in the backseat. She persuades a reluctant Nails to take her with him, and as they drive on, an unlikely love story emerges. As readers learn Dallas’s backstory, it becomes clear that they need each other.

When Clayton hears what’s happened, he’s knows that his father, who avoids legal entanglements at all costs, hasn’t sent Nails away for a new start. Nails is driving to his death. So, in defiance of his father, Clayton heads for Jacksonville to save his friend. Their friendship may remind readers of George Milton and Lennie Small in John Steinbeck’s 1937 novella, “Of Mice and Men” — although Nails isn’t as limited as Lennie.

The compelling tale, its tone alternately brutal and tender, unfolds at a breakneck pace. The character development is superb, the settings are vivid, and the prose is as tight as a noose. The plot is full of twists. Among them is a startling revelation about Dallas’s identity, introducing a sensitive subject that Panowich handles with understanding and grace.

Bruce DeSilva, winner of the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award, is the author of the Mulligan crime novels including “The Dread Line.”

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Knife by Salman Rushdie review: living to tell the tale of being saved by love

Knife is surprisingly upbeat for a book about being stabbed in the head.

Salman Rushdie: leaning into his role as a poster-boy – ‘’A sort of virtuous liberty-loving Barbie doll, Free-Expression Rushdie”. Photograph: AP

On August 12th, 2022, the British author Salman Rushdie was about to speak at a literary event in upstate New York when an attacker stormed the stage and stabbed him 15 times . That he survived this onslaught was thanks in large part to the courageous intervention of several audience members, who managed to subdue the attacker within 30 seconds. And a dose of good fortune: “You’re lucky that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife,” his doctor observed.

The attack happened more than 30 years after the Iranian government issued a religious edict or fatwa calling for Rushdie’s assassination because it deemed his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, to be blasphemous. Rushdie lost an eye, but lived to tell the tale – quite literally, in this new memoir.

Near death was “an intensely physical experience”, and some of the details are grisly. The stricken eye, dangling from its socket, resembled a soft-boiled egg; Rushdie, who was aged 75 at the time of the attack, was placed on a ventilator, which felt “like having an armadillo’s tail pushed down your throat. And when it was removed it was like having an armadillo’s tail pulled out of your throat.”

His six-week hospitalisation, during which he underwent life-saving surgery and gruelling rehab, was an ordeal: he endured painful, intrusive procedures, and suffered horrible side effects from drug treatments; the hallucinations brought on by strong painkillers were a small upside.

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Later on, Rushdie was puzzled to learn that his assailant had arrived at the venue with not just one knife but a whole bagful. “Did he think he might pass them out to the audience and invite them to join in?” The suspect, a young man in his twenties, is currently awaiting trial. Pondering his possible motives, Rushdie breaks off from first-person narration and imagines a series of conversations between himself and his would-be killer. In this fictional vignette, reprising Rushdie’s customary magical realism, the assailant is portrayed as a credulous simpleton whose fanaticism is driven by loneliness and sexual frustration; he was radicalised online, by a YouTube preacher called “Imam Yutubi”.

Knife is surprisingly upbeat for a book about being stabbed in the head. As a lifelong atheist, Rushdie doesn’t believe in miracles as such, but a sense of deep gratitude – to the cosmos, if not a deity – is palpable in these pages. He pays touching tribute to his wife, the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, and expresses thanks for the messages of support he received after the attack: “I have no doubt at all that the love coming toward me – the love of strangers as well as family and friends – did a great deal to help me come through.” This is the soppy lingua franca of traumatised survivors, be they ordinary folk or Booker-winning wordsmiths – because sometimes, the cliche is the mot juste.

Early on in the book, Rushdie insists he doesn’t want these events to define him. For too long, his status as the beleaguered bête noire of religious zealots overshadowed his work as a novelist. “I have no intention of living in that narrative any more,” he declares. At first, he felt little desire to write about the attack, but his agent talked him round, and eventually he became convinced it was necessary – “my way of taking ownership of what happened”. By the end of the memoir, we find him adopting a rather serene, so-be-it attitude to the whole business, leaning into his role as a poster-boy – ‘’A sort of virtuous liberty-loving Barbie doll, Free-Expression Rushdie”.

Knife ends with a brisk recap of the Enlightenment principles which Rushdie holds dear. His 2022 address to a United Nations PEN America gala, in which he railed against the “dishonest narratives” underpinning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is reprinted here. He also calls out the “bigoted revisionism” of right-wing populists from Donald Trump in his adoptive country, the US, to Narendra Modi in the country of his birth, India. He proposes, quite sensibly, that “if we could simply make the distinction between private religious faith and public, politicised ideology, it would be easier to see things as they are and to speak out without worrying about offended sensibilities”.

This is welcome, as far as it goes. On the big, black-and-white questions that separate liberals from outright reactionaries, Rushdie is beyond reproach. But what of the more complex issues – the ones that pit liberals against liberals? One wonders, for example, if Rushdie has a view on US academics being fired from their jobs for expressing opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza. On such questions, he is above the fray. It falls to a new, younger cohort of dissident writers and intellectuals to fight those battles.

Houman Barekat

Houman Barekat, a contributor to The Irish Times, is a writer and critic and founding editor of the journal Review 31

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