Customer Reviews

America at Home

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

At first glance America At Home is but a wonderful collection of stunning and wholesome photographs of American households and their unique inhabitants. Sponsored by IKEA - my children's favorite store - America At Home turns out to have more depth than you would expect. Amusing, insightful and contemplative reflections are offered on the idea of what Home means to us by an impressive number of contributing writers who include famous author, Amy Tan, Matt Groening, creator of the Simpsons, Dominique Browning, the former editor of House and Garden, as well as Terry Teachout, Richard Rodgriguez, and David Pogue, who all reflect on our relationship to what we call "Home".

America At Home informs us about what's important to us. Kids, pets and spending money, it seems. Marriage, not so much. 35% of our children live in single or no parent homes, and even though 62% of us don't think money can buy happiness we spend 41 billion more than we earn on whatever it does buy.

Our hard working celebrities appear to live an average of 13 years less than us couch potatoes watching them. Since 85% of us do no exercise of any kind, you'll be surprised how many billions of dollars we - or maybe they! - spend each year on health clubs. Many more such statistics add to the overall impression of this fascinating book that will have you find yourself starting many "Did you know..." conversations, and leaving it on your coffee table for a conversation piece. This will be especially impressive if you get the custom cover jacket you can order featuring your very own - to quote Matt Groening - "kinda functional and kinda loopy" family!

I have spent hours of enjoyment with this book....losing myself in faces and places unknown to me, yet at the same time hauntingly familiar. Rick Smolan has captured America at the very time when so many of us feel we are losing a connection to the vitality and promise of our country. But in every page and every essay, there are precious reminders of where our strength for the future lies...in America's people and in our homes an communities. Thank you, Rick Smolan.....

I love the warmth of this book. I travel the world and am disturbed by the misconceptions many foreigners have of us here at home. (I can't say I blame them with the present administration having devastated our reputation and the relentless negative news reports.)
I would love to share this book with everyone abroad. It paints honest, touching, personal, everyman images of true Americans in all sorts of everyday activities in their homes.
Whether as a gift to people abroad or enjoyed with friends and family, this beautiful book presents who we are as everyday people. Honest, simple, good, loving Americans.
Thanks to Rick and Jennifer.

I have followed Rick Smolan's books for many years. This book touched me as few others have done. My Czech wife often seems to miss the diversity of the true America. I think all of us that have suffered these past 8 years where we might not have felt proud of our country can find something to feel proud of in this book. Here one can see so clearly and beautifully the diversity, the imagination, the love of family and friends that we who have grown up in America hold to be the true America. I shared this book with my wife who I think was quite surprised to see how many America's there are and to see what the true fabric of our society looks like beyond the slick magazines and endless TV glitz.

This is a book that you can give to someone who wants to see and better understand what America is truly about.

After giving the original America 24-7 as gifts to several friends and family, I've been delighted and excited to pick up each subsequent book! Just got the newest -- America at Home and am planning several gift covers already. They really are unique and fabulous gifts especially with digital pictures so easily obtainable. I use them a lot as new baby gifts, and they are fun and simple to create. Love the books, and this one just SMACKS of AMERICA! I highly recommend it!

A beautiful and elegant celebration of american life at home.
The authors also offer a great way to personalize the outer cover of the book with your own pictures. Very cool!! Customizing the cover makes a great conversation piece for your home as well as a great gift for friends and family.

This is a book for the whole family to page through and read together. It will be particularly appealing to children, since the material is not only appropriate for them - it is heavily focused on how the family is structured around the daily routine of kids.

The book celebrates our diversity. We are a much more complex country than the rest of the world gives us credit for. We are not uni-dimensional, by a long stretch. We have many regional and micro-cultures and a broad spectrum of lifestyles, habits and opinions.
In this book, Rick and Jennifer give a unique, respectful and gentle insight into people's homes and the things they care about. The camera sees the deep ties that bind all those people to their homes, their pets, their things, their landscape and, most importantly, to each other.

We see conservative households in the heartland, both Christians and Muslims, that home-school their children, read the Holy Book, and celebrate their faith in their families. We see recent immigrants trying to adapt to America, scrape a living here, while remaining profoundly attached to, and nostalgic of their ancestral traditions. We see conservative same-sex couples loving their children and struggling with their busy lives. We see affluent folks on the two Coasts embracing modernity and new age ideals. We see diverse dreams of happiness, technology, tradition, community and the counter-culture.

We see the immense mosaic of resources, cultures and moral ideals in our beautiful country, something to celebrate joyfully. As both John McCain and Barack Obama point out, we are about an ideal greater than ourselves, about service to family, our neighbors, and our country. This book is a lovely witness to this ideal.

This heartwarming, amazing book not only merits a place in every home around
the world, it is a gift of living insight to future generations. This team of Rick Smolan
and Jennifer Erwitt, who are behind many of the best-selling photography books
in publishing history. They have invited thousands of amateurs as well as 100 top professional photographers to take pictures for a week, of their visions of home. The result is a visual time capsule of American life at the beginning of the 21st century. Culled to 250-plus photographs on 240 pages, the images are augmented with detailed captions and a series of thought-provoking essays about home by a selection of noted writers. A compelling aspect of the book provides a way purchasers can personalize their copies by having a glossy custom cover created using one of their own photos, complete with caption on the inside flap. Unique!

Thank you Rick and Jennifer for taking us places so close to and so far from where we all live. America At Home is a page turner. Every photograph goes deeper into the life of America, at its heart.
You have again brought together talented photographers, picture editors and designers for a project that conveys more than its elements while setting down another time capsule in our country's ever-evolving cornerstone.
Now that we're home, what's for dinner?

This is a beautiful book of images showing what is diverse and what is the same about the way we live. Each time I look through it, I see something new. The photographs and captions convey a richness of these people and their lives. It makes me wish that I could be in those places and meet those people.