Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives

Former senator from North Carolina and John Kerry's running mate in 2004, Edwards delivers a poignant coffee-table meditation on an institution as intensely venerated in America as it is universal: home. Some 60 Americans—from novelist Isabel Allende, chef Mario Batali, musician John Mellencamp, quarterback Joe Montana and architect Maya Lin to numerous lesser-known professionals in social work, farming and academia—contribute reflections on the place where they grew up or the locus that has meant the most to them in their lives; large full-color photographs of those places accompany their stories. Their first-person testimony is consistently engaging and downright endearing. Danny Glover, for example, recalls his family's house in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco as the source from which he and his siblings inherited their lifelong consciousness of "equanimity and responsibility, ownership and aspiration." Paging through the book offers the reader a pleasant sense of discovery—of how people feel about how they live. Edwards's introduction, which unfortunately reads like a political speech, gives way to an inspiring, myth-making journey through diverse lives sprung from a vast, ever changing America. (Nov. 14)