Search results for ""bauhan (william l.),u.s.""

Chasing Eden is about seekers, Americans searching for their Eden, longing for a Promised Land, a utopia somewhere out on the horizon. With his usual deep perception, humor, and grace, Howard Mansfield writes about "a small gathering of Americans" united by longing and devotion in their search for something perfect here on earth, a goal that is ever receding. Mansfield illuminates how this longing – for God, for freedom, for peace – can be found in every era, and gives form and force to our lives in our pursuit of happiness – "the primary occupation of every American."

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Winner of the 2019 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. "You will love Dorsey Craft’s rollicking persona, Pirate Bonny Annie, who, in this thrilling book of poems, serves up heaps of scintillant treasures from the bottomless trunk of her imagination, wit, and verve. In Plunder, Jack Sparrow has met his match." - Deb Gorlin, judge, 2019 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize

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A contemporary woman makes complex negotiations with history and culture in a voice equally strong, discerning, God-soaked, and edgy—creating music out of personal longing and cultural tragedy. Hashem Beck’s poems offer a lens through which to see life in the Middle East. They are timeless explorations of love, loss, and the poet’s attempt to understand her own experience in the context of world events and the spiritual realities that permeate them.

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Philip Booth published ten volumes of meticulously crafted lyric poems in his lifetime, most of them set in and inscribed by the landscapes and cadences of Down East Maine. Like other major poets writing from New England who were his contemporaries, the echoes of Robert Frost register in his structure and language. Although his work received critical attention and several major awards, he did not enjoy the wide readership that many of his peers attracted. Available Light combines selected poems and personal photographs to paint a multidimensional portrait of Booth, and aims to ignite new interest in a poet who spent a "lifetime looking into how words see," writing incandescent poems in the process.

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Were you to cross George Howe Colt's recent classic, The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home, with John Grogan's beloved Marley & Me, you might end up with what Brenda Gilchrist has created in Waltzing With Bracey: A Long Reach Home. In this brave and thoughtful memoir, Gilchrist tells the story of learning to claim her place in the world-Deer Isle, Maine-and the wonderfully bossy little corgi, Bracey, who helps her to do so. After a girlhood spent abroad in various world capitals, Gilchrist has never felt entirely at home anywhere, or indeed, particularly confident about who she is. Her family's Deer Isle summer cottage might qualify as an anchor of sorts. But there are so many ghosts up there-so many august forebears to live up to. As a middle-aged New Yorker she confronts her Aunt Eleanor's bequest of the Deer Isle property. Moving to Maine full-time with her corgi puppy in tow, she sets out to claim not just this big, rambling, shingle-style pile of a house but also her own life. Bracey is vital to this process, serving as companion and example. There is a great deal to learn from this energetic little alpha, who seems never to have known a self-doubt in his brief, well-furred life. Here is a love letter to the glories of the Maine Coast and to the human/animal bonds that can so enrich a life.

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Winner of the May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry PrizeSet in rural England during and after the bubonic plague pandemic of 1348-1349, this verse novel drives to the heart of what we humans are capable of when boiled down to our very core in the struggle to survive - and how, in more ways than one, it’s not our intelligence or our resiliency, but love and the non-human animals that save us.

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In Essays from Essex, Sydney M. Williams III shares new musings on family, nature, and the miracles to be found in everyday life. The nearly two dozen entries in this, his third collection, range from stories of growing up in the 1940s and '50s, Christmases past, and remembrances of friends, to observations on the joys of motherhood and the return of Atlantic sturgeon to the Connecticut River. The book also includes a half-dozen drawings by Williams’s grandson, Alex.

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Today, the sounds of steam whistles and trains are no longer heard among the mountains and valleys in most of Cheshire County, New Hampshire, though to the west and south in the Connecticut Valley and in north-central Massachusetts, steel rails are still very much alive. The two volumes of Iron Roads of the Monadnock Region bring to life the story of now largely forgotten railroads that once operated in the area, shining new light on the roads’ stories from their beginnings to the present, tracing high and low points, glory days, times of struggles, disasters, and wrecks. This little-known history of the roads is loaded with hard-to-find historical information, indexed, and copiously illustrated and enriched by rare and unpublished photos—over 700 images, maps, and tables—it’s all here, an essential reference for the serious rail fan. Volume I presents the story of the formation and operational history of the railroad network in the rugged mountains and valleys of the Monadnock Region. An introductory overview encapsulates the Region’s railroad era: its beginnings, glory years, and end. Chapters 1–9 follow, detailing four roads built before the Civil War: the Vermont and Massachusetts, Cheshire, Sullivan, and Ashuelot.

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Today, the sounds of steam whistles and trains are no longer heard among the mountains and valleys in most of Cheshire County, New Hampshire, though to the west and south in the Connecticut Valley and in north-central Massachusetts, steel rails are still very much alive. The two volumes of Iron Roads of the Monadnock Region bring to life the story of now largely forgotten railroads that once operated in the area, shining new light on the roads’ stories from their beginnings to the present, tracing high and low points, glory days, times of struggles, disasters, and wrecks. This little-known history of the roads is loaded with hard-to-find historical information, indexed, and copiously illustrated and enriched by rare and unpublished photos—over 700 images, maps, and tables—it’s all here, an essential reference for the serious rail fan. Following on the first volume, Volume II describes the construction and operational histories of railroads built after the Civil War, when railroad building euphoria swept the Region as communities, left behind by the earliest roads, desperately sought connection to the rail network. Chapters 10–16 cover the Worcester and Hillsborough, Manchester and Keene, Ashburnham, and Ware River roads, as well as street railways and little-known quarry roads.

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After a chidhood that included several years spent in Europe, Peter Dewey participated in some of the most dramatic and importent episodes of World War II. As They Were is a compilation of Dewey's writings chronicling life in Paris in the months leading up to the Nazi attack of France in May, 1940.

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Writer and teacher Leaf Seligman encourages students to use writing as a way to "deepen connection, make meaning or clarify it." In this pocket-sized book she asks more than seventy questions intended as invitations to plumb, to look, to listen, and to engage with life.

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Parades tell us something important about American culture and almost every place has a parade tradition. The Best Ever! explores this tradition as enacted in the small cities and towns of New England, events that at once celebrated the skeleton of the American Story and amplified both the distinctive regional and the broader national cultures. Meticulously documented and lavishly illustrated with nearly 300 photographs, The Best Ever! offers never-before-seen pictures of actual parades, including floats and banners that have mostly disappeared and ranging from the Federal Ship carried in the 1788 Ratification parade at New Haven, Connecticut, to 1940 when the parade tradition largely halted at the onset of WWII. Copublished with Old Sturbridge Village.

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Judge Andrew Merton describes this collection of essays as “a coming-of-age memoir infused with a refreshing generosity of spirit.”

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Gary Margolis’s eighth book of poetry takes us inside the imagination of a museum of islands. With selections from Runner Without a Number and Time Inside, collections that speak to the Boston Marathon bombing and his experience of facilitating a poetry workshop in a maximum security prison, Margolis continues to explore how the facts of our lives - grief and joy, clarity and confusion - both sustain and lift us, and lead us to meanings in and beyond words. With humor and paradox, he takes us into the many emotional and natural landscapes of New England and our nation - from a town’s summer book sale to an activist scaling the Statue of Liberty; from Chagall to Facebook; from Emerson to Stephen Hawking; from Fenway Park to our state of the union, each poem is expressed with Margolis’s characteristic attention to detail and language, to the associative possibility with what we know, and to the mystery that allows us to walk through a life’s museum of islands.

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Francelia Clark finds and follows two of the oldest trails in New Hampshire’s Monadnock region into history—on horseback. Along the way she studies the cellar holes and rock remains of houses, wells, and walled cow paths, as well as old journals, to illuminate for readers the lives of the early settlers who made them.

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North Pole Promise tells the story of a secret legacy of two famous explorers: Commander Robert Peary and Matthew Henson - one white, one African American, who, with four Inuit assistants discovered the North Pole in 1909. Peary and Henson returned to the US shortly after - the white Peary to acclaim, the African American Henson to obscurity - never to go to the Pole again. They each left behind sons, fathered with indigenous Greenlandic Inuit women. In the 1980s, on a research trip to Greenland, Dr. Allen Counter was introduced to two men in their eighties - the surviving “Amer-Inuit” sons - one from each explorer. Dr. Counter, an explorer himself, tells of discovering the fate of those children and ultimately honoring them and their illustrious forebears on the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the North Pole.

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A collection of poems

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Named after a workaday knife wielded by shepherds and farmers in the high pastures of the Alps when a tool for paring, shaping, cutting into, scraping out of, or freeing is useful, these poems likewise cleave away the false and deceptive to clarify and reveal a startling and unifying wonder. In language radiant, lovely, and disturbing, Rebecca Kaiser Gibson explores the linkages between the uncomfortable familiar and the curiously intimate strange, making unexpected connections between phenomena. Arranged by association rather than chronology and connected by a sensual intelligence, this collection wanders from Maryland and India to Boston, France, New Hampshire and Ireland - from Ezekiel's Flight and the Book of Kells, to the Tamil goddess Meenakshi.

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The mystery that attracts Howard Mansfield's attention is that some houses have life-are home, are dwellings, and others aren't. Dwelling, he says, is an old-fashioned word that we've misplaced. When we live heart and soul, we dwell. When we belong to a place, we dwell. Possession, they say, is nine-tenths of the law, but it is also what too many houses and towns lack. We are not possessed by our home places. This lost quality of dwelling-the soul of buildings-haunts most of our houses and our landscape. Dwelling in Possibility is a search for the ordinary qualities that make some houses a home, and some public places welcoming.

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This is the true story of how an unwanted cockatoo achieved international fame as a YouTube sensation, television star, and scientific study subject, all by rocking out to the beat of his favorite tunes. Snowball tells the story with his own spirited psitticine spin. But everything he says is true, including how he inspired the World's First Bird Dance-Off Contest, became the subject of a groundbreaking study about music and the brain, and has now gone into teaching children how to dance and doing charity work. Ages 8-13

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Following up on his book, Claremont Boy, noted attorney Joseph D. Steinfield offers more thoughtful commentary in this new collection of essays. In Time for Everything, Steinfield first looks back at friends, heroes, family, travel, being Jewish, and, of course, sports. He then turns his thoughts to the law and offers insight into issues that are particularly relevant today, such as the right to vote, executive power, the internet, and Constitutional issues arising during the coronavirus pandemic.

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Today, the sounds of steam whistles and trains are no longer heard among the mountains and valleys in most of Cheshire County, New Hampshire, though to the west and south in the Connecticut Valley and in north-central Massachusetts, steel rails are still very much alive. The two-volume set of Iron Roads of the Monadnock Region brings to life the story of now largely forgotten railroads that once operated in the area, shining new light on the roads’ stories from their beginnings to the present. Authors Blodget and Richards detail how and why the roads were built in the first place, where they went and what they did, their roles in the economy of the Monadnock Region, and what became of them. Seven years in the making, this set is a compendium of little-known history, tracing the high and low points of the roads, their first and last trains, glory days, times of struggles, disasters, and wrecks. Loaded with hard-to-find historical information, indexed, and copiously illustrated and enriched by rare and unpublished photos - over 700 images, maps, and tables - it’s all here, an essential reference for the serious rail fan.

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This book focuses on a stream in New Hampshire and how it and other bodies of water have been affected by changes in technology, economic values, new forms of pollution, new ideas about nature and the occasionally unintended consequences of human action. The time period is from the industrial revolution to the present day. The geographic scope is largely New England but also includes recent experiences in other parts of the United States and the world. The book is as much about people as it is water with stories about conservationists, artists, reservoir managers, government officials, water power people, fishermen, scientists and ordinary citizens around water.

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Albert Duvall Quigley spent most of his life painting the people and landscapes of the Monadnock region. A self-taught musician, he built and repaired fiddles, wrote dance tunes, and played at local dances. He also made frames known for their beautiful workmanship and originality, and prized by many Monadnock artists. This catalog has been compiled for an exhibition celebrating Quigley’s life and work that will open at the Historical Society of Cheshire County (NH) in May 2017, and for the 250th anniversary celebration of the town of Nelson, NH, where Quigley lived for many years.

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Mimi Bull grew up secure and happy in the love of family, friends, and neighbors, never questioning the unusual circumstances that caused her to be adopted in the late 1930s by an older woman with an adult daughter. It was years before she learned the secret truth: the women were her grandmother and her biological mother, and the story of her adoption had been concocted not only to shield her mother’s reputation, but to hide the fact that her father was the gregarious young parish priest everyone adored. Only very recently has the Catholic Church begun to acknowledge the existence of children of priests, and Bull writes candidly of the emotional toll that this policy of secrecy and denial took on her—“I should like to have lived a life with my loving parents, knowing who we all were, knowing my father’s family from the beginning, and without the forty years of depression that compromised me and those I loved.

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Between 2009 and 2014, McEwen interviewed more than 50 women about their relationship to money. Those interviews culminated in a play (Legal Tender), as well as numerous presentations and workshops, and now this book, in which she shares those stories and some of her own discoveries.

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In this entertaining autobiography, the Rev. Patrick Forbes looks back at an exceptionally varied ministry in the Church of England - from being the idiot curate to parish priest, to religious programs producer, to a BBC Radio 2's "Pause For Thought" contributor, to co-founder of the Holy Fools UK, all while asking challenging questions about the future direction of the church. Sometimes known as "Partick Frobes, the well-known clerical error", Forbes often finds and points out the humor and not-so-funny "elephants in the room", after his more than eighty years in the church. He may be the only ordained minister in the Church of England to have been blessed by an Archbishop of Canterbury as the front end of a pantomime horse. "Imagine just for a moment that most of our discussions in the Church about how we survive into the next generation are starting in the wrong place. Patrick Forbes's irresistibly lively memoir suggests that it wouldn't hurt to stop and open our eyes - not only to a herd of persistently ignored and self-inflicted problems but also to the abundance of gift and newness that he has discovered in his unique pilgrimage." - The Rt. Rev’d. Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury (2002-2012)

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In 2012, McCagg and her husband, Carl built an off-grid, solar-powered house in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. It was to be a weekend getaway for the writer (“what’s this pitchfork for?”) and trombonist (a wannabe farmer). In December, with two cats and six newly adopted chicks, they drove up to Jaffrey from their home in Providence, Rhode Island, ostensibly just for the winter so their new pipes wouldn’t freeze… But their hen “Rhoda Red” turned out to be “Big Red.” Roosters are outlawed by Providence city regulations, so Big Red couldn’t go back. Thus, writes McCagg, “neither did we. Survival of the fittest. Natural selection. Soul evolution. We named our 193-acre home “Darwin’s View” for a reason.” Chicken kerfuffles lighten the mood, but this story is born of heartbreak, of yearning for the great beauty of the world as it used to be. As she moves from full-time weekender to organic gardener, McCagg interlaces her tale with her mother’s battle with Parkinson’s, braiding both Mother and Mother Nature. Add the sun, the wind, and a cock-a-doodle-do, and you have the recipe for a perfect storm of personal growth rippling out to effect a larger transformation.

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Paul Levy was a year old when his Uncle Phil was killed in World War II, and his family, like many, faced their grief with silence. Upon retirement, and seventy years after his uncle’s death, he set out to discover what might still be found about Phil. At every step, research led to unexpected turns, and ultimately revealed a vivid portrait of Phil’s life and, astoundingly, of his death. In the process, the author also gained insights into war, antisemitism, family silences, and heroism, and encountered intriguing and sometimes famous characters who had touched Phil’s life.

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Written with a delightful sense of irony and a profound tenderness, The Education of a Yankee is an engaging memoir that skillfully reveals the grand, eccentric, and occasionally tragic history of a very unconventional family. Judson Hale was born into Boston's very proper Brahmin world, the son of a wealthy father who loved sailing and horseback riding and a beautiful, talented mother who loved opera and sang professionally. But readers expecting a conventional account of New England privilege will be delightfully surprised. The fate of Hale's older brother, Drake, led his parents to embark on a dramatic, extravagant, and visionary undertaking that changed the family's history and brought a remarkable adventure to the small town of Vanceboro, Maine. So began an idealistic and wonderful dream that was to shape Hale's childhood and adolescence, but which ended differently from what his parents had envisioned. The Education of a Yankee, at once funny and touching, is full of marvelous anecdotes about life on this unusual farm. We watch anxiously as he finally meets his brother, Drake, and see him wrestle with the challenges of joining the family-owned Yankee magazine, which, under his editorial direction, has become the third largest regional magazine in the country.

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The title of this lovely and masterful collection, The Next Hunger, refers to the spiritual hunger that grows out of a "world of craving." The lyric forms of these poems shift and change as the poet traces the links between the beautiful and tragic, the grace-filled and desolate, in all our daily devotions-the apprehension of Mystery in every worldly thing leading, finally, to self-forgetfulness.

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DM Me, Mother Darling pulses with the confusion, elation, and shattering fear of 21st century parenthood. Through the eyes of Peter Pan’s Mother Darling and Doran’s own experience navigating modern motherhood, the struggles so often fought in silence come careening forward, electric as the light that defines them. Through a tangle of casinos, Lizzo, and gravel parking lots, Doran takes readers to a narcotized Neverland where the mire of grief and the desperation of joy burn with the same endless flame.

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Whiskey Boys: And Other Meditations from the Abyss at the End of Youth is a lively collection of literary essays about bars, booze, and traveling the American West. The book follows the author from small-town Illinois to the West Coast after he abandons a legal career to pursue writing. Much of the narrative concerns growing up and what’s gained and lost with maturity, while considering the challenges of living as a writer in a culture that’s skeptical of the creative arts. Other threads include travel, wanderlust, the psychological effect of place, and mortality.

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This is a new edition of Birthday Deathday & Other Stories by Padma Perera, first published by The Women's Press, England, 1985, with international reviews from the UK, USA, Europe, and the Commonwealth countries. Additional material now provides more oral history from the first four decades just before and after India's Independence, 1940s-1980s. The story "Doctor Salaam" was included in Salman Rushdie's Mirrorwork, an anthology of the best Indian fiction in English during the fifty years after India’s Independence.

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Winner of the 2020 Monadnock Essay Collection Prize. In this memoir, written within a collection of essays, Patrick Mondaca deftly threads together stories of his wartime service in Iraq, his pre-war experience, and his postwar efforts to readjust to civilian life. From small-town Connecticut to Baghdad, to Darfur and New York City, Mondaca considers the effects of war on the soldier - what it does to one’s psyche, identity, and morality. While he is just one of millions who have returned from this country’s ongoing armed conflicts, his moving essays offer a glimpse into the experience of veterans struggling to find their way back to their prior lives and the loved ones trying to understand them. The collection speaks deeply and thoughtfully to many issues of our times.

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This is a book about “a beautiful and gallant craft” - the personification, in a wooden boat, of the finest qualities of the Adirondack culture of the 19th century. Beautifully illustrated, The Adirondack Guideboat is the definitive guide to these beautiful boats and their makers, both early and contemporary.

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Howard Mansfield muses on people, places, and life in his own hometown of Hancock, New Hampshire. “Whenever Howard Mansfield writes about the world around him, I pay attention.” Mel Allen, editor, Yankee magazine “It’s as if Walt Whitman had come out of the grave in the persona of Howard Mansfield for one more epic. I highly recommend this “small book” full of big ideas.” Ernest Hebert, prize-winning author of Howard Elman’s Farewell, The Old American, and nine other novels

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These stories are specific to one legendary riverfront plateau and one boy’s journey, but are emblematic of immigrant life and blue-collar aspirations during the heyday of American industry and its crash, foreshadowing one of the largest internal migrations in U.S. history. Approximately six million baby boomers, like the narrator, fled the Rust Belt. Another six million remained and stories of their youth, struggles, and aspirations echo throughout this book. Pittsburgh alone attracts die-hard affinity with its scattered natives.

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A collection of columns about the wilderness of New England and more from well-known New Hampshire and Vermont naturalist and commentator Willem Lange.

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In her vital, elegiac poems, Deborah Gorlin inventories her dead in urgent acts of recognition and commemoration. Family members - both nuclear and extended - appear in their native stories to reanimate local histories, intimate geographies, and lost times. In a different series of personae poems, Gorlin catalogues dolls and totems within their particular cultural habitats, which range from Africa to the Andes, and imagines their daemonic hopes, dreams and emotions. In a final act of inclusion, she takes stock of her own spiritual hesitations, yearnings, approximations, and explorations of such crazy topics as fingernails, Hebraic trees, and fat.

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"We called him tortoise because he taught us."—Lewis Carroll A daily reader of prayer and meditation in serving the practice of lectio divina or "divine reading" based on the twelve chapters of Christian McEwen's 2011 book called World Enough & Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down. Focusing in turn on different subjects, each month introduces a new subject ranging from "the art of slowing down," considering good company and conversation, investigating "child time," to the joys and relaxation to be found in walking. Those who are familiar with Christian's original text will recognize many of the entries, which have been arranged so as to flow smoothly from one to the next, helping to deepen and clarify each particular theme. The title is drawn, with laughing gratitude, from Lewis Carroll (see the epigraph, above), though it has more ancient origins too. In The Tortoise Diaries, Christian McEwen gives her readers beautiful insight of how slowness can open doors to sustained creativity.

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This inventive book has at its core a collection of linked short stories depicting the lives of sideshow oddities in an early twentieth-century carnival traveling through the rural south. While the fiction opens a door to another world, ultimately it invites readers to think differently about the world we inhabit and the universal need to belong, to experience redemption, to reclaim our imperfections as part of what makes us whole. An introductory essay frames the collection, inviting readers to consider more deeply how the socio-historical context and characters create metaphors for our own experience. The book concludes with a series of creative prompts to engage readers with the text so that the stories continue to unfold.

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Parades tell us something important about American culture and almost every place has a parade tradition. The Best Ever! explores this tradition as enacted in the small cities and towns of New England, events that at once celebrated the skeleton of the American Story and amplified both the distinctive regional and the broader national cultures. Meticulously documented and lavishly illustrated with nearly 300 photographs, The Best Ever! offers never-before-seen pictures of actual parades, including floats and banners that have mostly disappeared and ranging from the Federal Ship carried in the 1788 Ratification parade at New Haven, Connecticut, to 1940 when the parade tradition largely halted at the onset of WWII. Copublished with Old Sturbridge Village.

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While reporting on citizens fighting natural gas pipelines and transmission lines planned to cut right across their homes, Howard Mansfield saw the emotional toll of these projects. “They got under the skin,” writes Mansfield. “This was about more than kilowatts, powerlines, and pipelines. Something in this upheaval felt familiar. I began to realize that I was witnessing an essential American experience: the world turned upside down. And it all turned on one word: property.”

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In Girl as Birch, Gibson mimics the flexible (adaptable? too pliant? healthily, if secretly, resilient, then, finally, aligned) motion of a birch in strong wind, as it relates to the options seemingly available to her, growing up as a girl. The poems imitate in form the experiences they evoke. The leitmotifs of red, birches, mirrors, walls enclosing gardens, labyrinths as metaphors for constraint, recur throughout the book. Without being a manifesto, Girl as Birch explores female gender roles with both pliant and uprising imagery and action. Restriction and rebellion, silence and speech, appearance and artifice, passion and repression, the past and being present, buffet and embolden the speaker of these poems. The elastic and varied syntax, pace, music, and the use of rhetoric and wit express deft self-examination. The book moves from serial impressionistic poems of early childhood to discrete lyric poems of memory and experience and on to a sense of emotional, social, spiritual evolution, not resolution.

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Block, Paper, Chisels is a colorful collection of over seventy prints created by artist Kim Cunningham throughout her four decades in the Monadnock Region of New Hampshire. This wide-ranging exploration of the block print medium includes everything from images of familiar landscapes and local wildlife to more abstract collages celebrating the beauty of trees. Background information on Kim’s influences and technique are included, and her haiku poems accompany two series of prints.

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It’s 1977. A 22-year-old finds herself ensconced in a place of dust and history: the archives room of a second-rate college. She’s re-shelving Victorian etiquette books when the door opens and in walks a fabulous, seductive, larger-than-life writer of historical romances - and the young woman’s life will never be the same. Set against 25 years of cultural evolution, the love between the two women - the younger librarian and the grande dame of cheesy literature - outlasts a 28-year age difference, romantic dalliances, illness, and the confines of the closet. Along the way, the librarian ponders the nature of life, death, religion, and philosophy with the help of the imaginary counterparts of Socrates, Hildegard of Bingen, and Suzanne Pleshette; samples casseroles with names like Vegetables Psychosis and The Tubers Karamazov; and forges a family with her best friend, Jeff, and assorted quirky characters who wander into their lives.

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These essays-or as Sydney Williams calls them: "musings"-are evocative of a time and a place-of growing up in a New Hampshire village in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Sydney Williams was the second of nine children whose parents were sculptors and who was raised on a small farm, with horses, goats and chickens-an unconventional life in an unconventional place, but during a conventional time. They include memories of his parents and their families, of books and of skiing. While they are personal, their message is universal message. It is one of remembrance-the closeness of families and the effect genes and environment have on how we become who we are.

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