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[GingerPeach]

I knew this book looked familiar.  I looked at it on amazon, and amazon has that great feature that tells you whether and when you purchased something.  I had bought it back in 2004.  But now I'm frustrated because I can't find it amongst all my other books.  Darn!

[Quackeroo]

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@house_cat wrote:

I've only read the first three chapters. It's inspiring to those of us who care about homemaking in a world where it is no longer valued. (That's my opinion, the author doesn't say that.)  I have the Kindle version so I haven't browsed through the whole book, but the author clearly says that it is not a housekeeping shortcuts book.

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I have found it to be the same, House_Cat. Inspiring!  To me, the opening chapters are encouraging because the message I have received for years from American culture is that the keeping of home & hearth is a waste of time.

From the PREFACE:

"When you keep house, you use your head, your heart, and your hands together to create a home--the place where you live the most important parts of your private life. Housekeeping is an art: it combines intuition and physical skill to create comfort, health, beauty, order and safety. It is also a science, a body of knowledge that helps us seek those goals and values wisely, efficiently, humanely." 

"Some of this skill and knowledge is directed toward keeping the home clean, but cleaning is only a part of keeping house, and in modern homes an ever-smaller part. Keeping house has always encompassed knowing and doing whatever is needed to make the home a small, living society with the capacities to meet the needs of people in their private life: everything from meals, shelter, clothing, warmth, and other physical necessities to books and magazine, music, play, facilities for entertianing oneself and others, a place to work, and much more. 

"This book contains practical how-to-do-it material on many of these subjects, for both novices and those experienced in keeping house, and, because keeping house is a labor of love, it devotes space to its meanings as well as to its methods."

~Quack