Search results for ""david r. godine publisher inc""

“Reads like a mystery”—PBS News Hour“You’ll find it hard to put down.”—NPR, “Books We Love” When reclusive, millionaire artist Robert Indiana died in 2018, he left behind dark rumors and scandal, as well as an estate embroiled in lawsuits and facing accusations of fraud. Here, for the first time, are all the pieces to the bizarre true story of the artist’s final days, the aftermath, the deceptive world that surrounded him, and the inner workings of art as very big business.“I’m not a business man, I'm an artist,” Robert Indiana said, refusing to copyright his iconic LOVE sculpture in 1965. An odd and tortured soul, an artist who wanted both fame and solitude, Indiana surrounded himself with people to manage his life and work. Yet, he frequently changed his mind and often fired or belittled those who worked with him. By 2008, when Indiana created the sculpture HOPE—or did he?—the artist had signed away his work for others to exploit, creating doubt about whether he had even seen artwork sold for very high prices under his name.At the time of his death, Indiana left an estate worth millions—and unsettling suspicions. There were allegations of fraudulent artwork, of elder abuse, of caregivers who subjected him to horrendous living conditions. There were questions about the inconclusive autopsy and rumors that his final will had been signed under coercion. There were strong suspicions about the freeloaders who’d attached themselves to the famous artist. “In the final hours of his life,” the author writes, “Robert Indiana was without the grace of a better angel, as the people closest to him covered their tracks and plotted their defenses.”With unparalleled access to the key players in Indiana’s life, author Bob Keyes tells a fast-paced and riveting story that provides a rare inside look into the life of an artist as well as the often, too often, unscrupulous world of high-end art. The reader is taken inside the world of art dealers, law firms, and an array of local characters in Maine whose lives intersected with the internationally revered artist living in an old Odd Fellows Hall on Vinalhaven Island.The Isolation Artist is for anyone interested in contemporary art, business, and the perilous intersection between them. It an extraordinary window into the life and death of a singular and contradictory American artist—one whose work touched countless millions through everything from postage stamps to political campaigns to museums—even as he lived and died in isolation, with a lack of love, the loss of hope, and lots and lots of money.

Read more less

A collection of great fishing stories by classic and contemporary authors—Zane Gray, Rudyard Kipling, Izaak Walton, James Prosek—broad in their reach and sweep.Ranging in location from the Sierras to Afghanistan, and there is as much meditative tranquility and resonance in these tales as stories of landing (or losing) “the big one.”To be sure, there are the great stories of big fish by angling legends, but there are also stories of human connections, of challenge and pathos, of the peace, even the spirituality, that comes with being a part of nature, and the companionship, or solitude, that comes with fishing. The collection includes examples of every type of angling experience, each a classic in its own right, writing that is by turns whimsical, instructional and sometimes heartbreaking. Most species are represented, and not always in the usual places: trout fishing in Africa, salmon fishing in Iceland, carp in California, spring walleyes in Minnesota, and even killer sharks on the screen.

Read more less

The history of a unique Boston institution: the men and women who serve as individual professional trustees, who control billions of dollars of assets, who have provided advice and counsel for generations of families, and who are universally known as “Boston Trustees.”This quiet and discrete legal service had its roots in the early nineteenth century, when Boston’s closely interconnected social and cultural élite faced the problem of how to pass on massive new wealth in a predictable, safe, and prudent way. Today, the practice remains alive and well, a major, and very profitable, component of almost every Boston law firm, bank and trust office.The book also answers questions about inheritances governed by trust law and by trustee participation. The authors guide the reader through the legal jargon to help understand trusts and the role of the trustee with actual examples of trusts and trust language. It is essential reading for anyone interested both in understanding trusts and in the evolution of Boston as a financial and regional hub, a city that not only knew how to make money but also how to preserve it.

Read more less

An enchanting story about an adventurous girl and her day at sea with Bonefish Joe, one of the best-known bonefish guides in the Bahamas. Young and fearless, Flossie, lives on Harbour Island, a small outpost in the Bahamas known for its exquisite three-mile pink sand beach and for bonefishing, a catch-and-release enterprise that pits a determined angler against an inedible, surprisingly powerful, and elusive quarry. Flossie's dream is to go fishing with the legendary guide Bonefish Joe, a beloved island institution who picks up clients at the dock and returns with them hours later, still fishless but satisfied. One Sunday, after church, Flossie's wish is surprisingly granted, and she and her friend discover the allure, the challenge, and the delights of hooking (and releasing) one of angling’s greatest prizes. Diana Wege's lush and vibrant illustrations of the island, its people, its customs, and its architecture, perfectly captures the character, culture, and charm of the Bahamas and Harbour Island.

Read more less

A read-aloud picture book for young children that celebrates the heartland of our great country.Every country has a heart and America’s is in those places where golden wheat waves in the breeze, where great rivers flow, and cornfields stretch across the plains in glorious patchwork quilts of greens and yellows and browns.In this heartland, cattle graze in lush green pastures, horses and sheep fill the barns, and a newborn calf stands damp and warm in the sun. This picture book reflects all the great qualities of rural life.

Read more less

A visual celebration that captures Maine's rockbound coastline, its precarious and isolated islands, its independent and hardworking people. From the fogs off Eastport to the lobster boats off Monhegan, from the grain elevators of Portland to the Shakers of Sabbathday Lake, photographer George Tice has created page after page of dauntingly beautiful images – 107 quadtone photographs in all.

Read more less

Here are speeches, essays, and articles from them man who turned Boston University into a major educational institution. John Silber speaks as an educator, parent, philosophical leader, and political observer and participant (Ahead in the polls, he probably would have been elected Governor of Massachusetts had he not run afoul of a beloved media personality. The famous incident is recounted in high style in Tom Wolfe’s foreword).He tackles issues including education at all levels, culture and the media, democracy and international affairs. Delivered from 1971 to 2012, the speeches offer his incisive reflections on the Vietnam War, Watergate, student activism of the seventies, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, developments in science and technology, the increasing power of the media, global corporations, and many other issues. His style is lively, crisp, and pointed, spiked with his acerbic wit and guided by an ongoing search for wisdom.Mr. Silber was a model of probity and integrity in both his private and his public life, an intellectual pessimist and a congenital optimist. Even as he transformed Boston University from a sleepy and fast-declining “streetcar college,” he spoke out on topical issues and principles on which our human fulfillment and national identity depended. Inspiring many and infuriating some, his was a life that mattered and his voice was one worth listening to.

Read more less

A very funny view of the great, and nearly great, people throughout history by New Yorker humorist Will Cuppy. Hysterically funny (yet historically accurate), Cuppy transforms luminaries such as Nero, Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, Lucrezia Borgia, Attila the Hun, Lady Godiva and Miles Standish into human beings. These are not the usual portraits but as we would have known them Cuppy-wise: foolish, fallible, and very much our common ancestors.After leaving Chicago for New York City, for eight years, from 1921 to 1929, Will Cuppy lived as a hermit on Jones Island, off Long Island’s South Shore. From there, he gained a reputation for his factual but funny magazine articles and wrote the book, How to be a Hermit, his first bestseller.The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody was left unfinished after Cuppy’s death in 1949. The manuscript was completed by a friend from some 15,000 note cards in Cuppy’s apartment. The book spent four months on the New York Times bestseller list and has endured as a classic of American humor.

Read more less

Like many good fables, this story opens with a child left in the woods. A large lizard picks up the infant and takes her home, where she soon grows into a pretty, pampered, and generally useless young woman named Isabella. Despite her adoptive mother's efforts (for the lizard is really a witch in disguise) to shape her up, the girl prefers the alluring life offered her by the charming Prince Rupert, a world of cooks and servants, palaces and jewels, luxury and indolence. Luckily, the witch is a canny, concerned parent. She does not suffer fools lightly and is not about to let her daughter's too-easy transition to palace life go unchallenged. And so she arranges a surprise transformation for her daughter one that puts the prince's marital plans on hold and gives the witch just enough time to hammer home a few lessons about the downside of idleness.

Read more less

Catie Copley is a black Labrador retriever who lives an unusual life as Canine Ambassador at the Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. Her job includes welcoming guests, taking them for walks, and helping Jim at his job as the hotel’s Chief Concierge. Santol, who trained as a guide dog, just like Catie, is her canine counterpart at the Fairmont Le Château Frontenac in Quebec City, Canada. Catie, a very lady-like dog, is surprised when, one day, a large, furry, black-and-white intruder snatches her toy lobster and runs away with it. She is taken aback, but once she gets to know the rambunctious Santol they become firm friends. When Jim drives Santol back to Canada, Catie is very excited to go too. This is Catie’s first vacation and her first time in a strange city where they speak a different language. Santol introduces her to a famous goat, a friendly horse, a clumsy juggler, and intriguing new foods and smells. Catie finds that there is a lot of opportunity for adventure… maybe a little too much adventure.

Read more less

Henrietta has big dreams for a little chicken: learning to sing, to swim, to fly, and, most important of all, to lay golden eggs. Even when her three thousand, three hundred thirty-three fellow inmates in the old henhouse laugh at her ambitions, Henrietta holds fast, practicing day and night. And while she's honing her talents, she's also getting ready to move on to the bigger, brighter world she can see through the tiny hole in the henhouse wall. Our heroine is no fool; she knows her limitations, but doesn't let them destroy her ambitions, any more than she lets the henhouse walls keep her a prisoner. And she's not above causing a little havoc along the way - once the other three thousand, three hundred thirty-three chickens find her escape route, chaos reigns in the barnyard, by the pond, and among the wheat fields. Whether Henrietta achieves her dreams is debatable, but through her persistence and her resolute belief in herself, she does manage to change the lives of everyone in the henhouse for the better. This delightful fable is the first book by Hanna Johansen to be published in English. The spirited pen-and-ink illustrations by Kathi Bhend, printed in two colours, capture the henhouse denizens and their frenetic escapades down to the last feather.

Read more less

Thirty short poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, with woodcuts by Raoul Dufy, of Dufy, that celebrate mammals, birds, fish, insects, and the mythical poet and prophet Orpheus—filled with surprising images, wit, formal mastery, and wry irony.First published in 1911, and embellished with the graphically sophisticated woodcuts, this collection presents a voice that ranges from the colloquial to the impassioned, a brisk combination of lyric imagery and bawdy humor.Apollinaire was an early and influential champion of Cubism, the friend of Braque, Picasso, Dufy, and Rousseau, and a seminal figure in the revolutionary art style known as “Surrealism,” a term that he coined. This a rare treat for lovers of French literature, art, and culture.

Read more less

These two puzzle-solving classics are sure to enthral junior detective everywhere. Full of hitmen, hoods, sneak-thieves, and kidnappers, the Crime & Punishment books offer mysteries as challenging as any novel. The clues are all here, just waiting for young Sam Spades and Jane Marples to piece together the solutions. Each two-page mystery features a short description of the crime and a detailed drawing of the crime scene, which provide all the facts. Guided by questions, young sleuths can narrow down the evidence and find the culprit.

Read more less

Cool logic shattered like a kaleidoscopic image into symmetrical and infinitely meaningless beauties. Published by Black Sparrow Press, 24 Tenth Street, Santa Rosa, CA 95401. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Read more less

West of Rome's two novellas, "My Dog Stupid" and "The Orgy," fulfill the promise of their rousing titles. The latter novella opens with virtuoso description: "His name was Frank Gagliano, and he did not believe in God. He was that most singular and startling craftsman of the building trade-a left-handed bricklayer. Like my father, Frank came from Torcella Peligna, a cliff-hugging town in the Abruzzi. Lean as a spider, he wore a leather cap and puttees the year around, and he was so bowlegged a dog could lope between his knees without touching them."

Read more less

“A delight”—BooklistA richly illustrated historical account of English-language dictionaries, and the people who made them, from the dawn of printing to the present day. Dictionaries are repositories of erudition, monuments to linguistic authority, and battlefields in cultural and political struggles. For centuries, they were also works of almost superhuman endurance, produced by people who devoted themselves for years, even decades, to the wearisome labor of corralling, recording, and defining the vocabulary of a language. Dictionaries also are often beautiful objects: typographically innovative, designed to project learning and authority. Painstakingly collected and lovingly presented, here are the stories behind great works of scholarship and the people who produced them—their prodigious endurance, their nationalist fervor, their philological elucubrations haphazardly mixed with crackpot theories, their

Read more less

Far-ranging and thought-provoking essays on the relation of art and ethnic identity. This first collection by award-winning author John Yau, drawn from decades of work, includes essays about Black, Asian, Latinx, and Native American artists: sculptors Luis Jimenez and Ruth Asawa; “second generation Abstract Expressionists” such as the Black painter Ed Clark and the Japanese American painter Matsumi Kanemitsu; the performance artists James Luna and Patty Chang; the photographers Laurel Nakadate and Teju Cole; and a generation of Asian American artists that has emerged during the last decade. While identity is at the fore in this collection, Yau’s essays also propose the need for an expansive view of identity, as in the essay “On Reconsidering Identity,” which explores the writings of Lydia Cabrera and Edouard Glissant, and the possibilities of creolisation versus the reductiveness of Aime Cesaire’s Negritude.Please Wait by the Coat Room is for serious readers interested in the art and artists of color that many mainstream institutions and critics misrepresented or overlooked. It presents a view guided by the artists’ desire for autonomy and freedom in a culture that has deemed them undesirable or invisible.

Read more less

“Soaked in booze and sadness, psychotic eruptions and hilarity.”—Willy VlautinIn the freewheeling, debaucherous tradition of Charles Bukowski, a taxi driver’s stories from the streets of lowlife Los Angeles—with an introduction by Willy Vlautin. “Dan Fante is an authentic literary outlaw.”—New York Times. Dan Fante lived the stories he wrote. His voice has the immediacy of a stranger of the next barstool, of a friend who lives on the edge. As he writes in Short Dog (the title is street slang for a half-pint of alcohol): I had been back working a cabbie gig as a result of my need for money. And insanity. Hack driver is the only occupation I know about with no boss, and because I have always performed poorly at supervised employment, I returned to the taxi business. The up side, now that I was working again, was that my own boozing was under control and I was on beer only, except for my days off.Fante was the son of famed novelist and screenwriter John Fante, but as the Los Angeles Times wrote, the younger Fante “… allows us a glimpse of the Southern California demimonde that surely escaped his father’s attention.”These outsider stories are raw, vivid, and brutally honest. But even when the stories are fueled by anger and disgust, they are punctuated by unexpectedly funny and dark-humored vignettes. Short Dog is for readers ready for a cab ride on the wild side.

Read more less

“Seething Nation! Vast & Flowing! Day & Night & Dawn!” Bold, sweeping, investigative, rhapsodic, hilarious, heart-rendering, thought-provoking, Edward Sanders' three-volume, America: A History in Verse uniquely and brilliantly tells "the story of America...a million stranded fabric / woven by billions of hands & minds”. It is by turns angry, wistful, defiant and extremely funny re-inventions of historical and biographical worlds, a highly original mix of chronicle, anecdote, document, reportage, paean and polemic. Volume 1, 1900-1939 chronicles the birth of the American century through one world war and to the brink of a second. Not since Leaves of Grass has there been such an un-ironic attempt to give voice to “the rhapsody of a great nation / where so many sing without cease / work without halt / shoulder without shudder / to bring the Feather of Justice to every / bell tower, biome & blade of grass / in Graceful America.” Long may Sanders sing our common song, and long may his America “dwell in peace, freedom & equality / out on its spiraling arm / in the Milky Way.”

Read more less

“Flows with depth and power....wide-open wonder.”—Washington Post“Simon Van Booy electrifyingly combines story with parable....wise, witty and always breathtakingly beautiful.”—San Francisco Chronicle, Best Fiction of the Year As a writer lies dying, he has one last story to tell: a tale of faith and devotion, a meditation on what lies beyond this life, and a prayer of gratitude that may lead to rebirth. This is Simon Van Booy at his visionary best. “Language is a map leading to a place not on the map,” announces a young writer lying in a hospital bed at the beginning of The Presence of Absence. As he contemplates his impending physical disappearance and the impact on his beloved wife, he realizes, “Life doesn’t start when you’re born . . . it begins when you commit yourself to the eventual devastating loss that results from connecting to another person.” Infused with poetic clarity and graced with humor, Simon Van Booy’s innovative novella asks the reader to find beauty—even gratitude—in the cycle of birth and death. Stripped of artifice, The Presence of Absence is a meditation between the writer and the reader, an imaginative work that challenges the deceit of written words and explores our strongest emotions. Simon Van Booy is not only a master storyteller but a writer whose fiction is rich with philosophical insights into things both mapped and undiscovered. The Presence of Absence parts the darkness to reveal what has been just out of sight all along.

Read more less

The story of a man coming into his own by coming home. Since he was a boy, Bill Eville knew he wanted two things in life: to be a writer and a father. Being a minister’s husband had not been on this list, having left the church as a teenager as soon as his parents stopped making him go each Sunday. In Washed Ashore, Eville’s life changes when his wife Cathlin takes a job as the first female pastor of a 350-year-old church on Martha’s Vineyard, the island that was once home to generations of his ancestors. With their two small children in tow, the couple begins a new life eight miles out at sea. Readers follow Eville’s journey from stay-at-home-dad to newspaper editor as he discovers what it means to be a writer, a father, and—after his wife’s devasting breast cancer diagnosis—what it truly means to be a minister’s husband. Washed Ashore, told in a series of linked essays, is poignant and funny, filled with faith, struggle, and light.

Read more less

“One of the Year’s Best,” Times Literary Supplement When a writer tracks down his literary hero, Graham Greene, who is living quietly on the shores of the Mediterranean, the author finds his new friend is every bit as complex as the fiction he’s famous for. While living in southern France in 1972, Michael Mewshaw engineered a meeting with Graham Greene. Mewshaw was an ambitious young journalist and novelist, Greene was an internationally revered elder statesman of letters. The pair became fast friends and corresponded for the next twenty years. My Man in Antibes is an intimate portrait of what it was like to eat, drink, and gossip with one of the most revered—and complicated—authors of the twentieth century. Growing up Catholic with literary aspirations, Mewshaw believed Greene was the author to emulate. Not only did Greene demonstrate how religious belief and church dogma could be subjects for fiction, he also wrote murder mysteries and political thrillers where his characters’ inner conflicts played out dramatically in exotic settings. Under Greene’s sway, Mewshaw traveled through Mexico like the whiskey priest in Greene’s The Power and the Glory and honeymooned at the Hotel Oloffson in Haiti, the setting of The Comedians. When Mewshaw tracked down Greene in Antibes, he found the author was far from a reclusive, close-mouthed figure: Greene garrulously recounted tales about the many women in his life—and husbands of those women—as well as his extraordinary interviews with political figures such as Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh. Over the next two decades, Mewshaw and Greene ate meals together, discussed their travels, and talked about writers they knew in common, such as Anthony Burgess, Shirley Hazzard, and Gore Vidal. While young Mewshaw looked up to the world-weary Greene, their relationship was never simply that of mentor and mentee. My Man in Antibes bristles with misunderstandings, arguments, and one young writer’s desire to get to know a legendary older writer who, in many ways, actively sought to remain unknowable.

Read more less

“Old Poets is an indispensable jewel.” —Washington Post“An astonishing array of encounters...Hall’s observations are shrewd and generous.” —Boston Globe Intimate portraits of great poets in old age, giving new insight into their work and their lives, and context to the often flawless art created by flawed human beings. The best of themselves endure, and the old poets’ existence and endurance gives readers courage to pursue their own vision. Donald Hall (Essays After Eighty and A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety) knew a great deal about work, about poetry, and about age. Each of those things come together in this unique collection. We hear about Robert Frost as Hall knew him: vain and cruel, a man possessed by guilt. But, as Hall writes, “The poet who survives is the poet to celebrate; the human being who confronts darkness and defeats it is the one to admire. For all his vanity, Robert Frost is admirable: He looked into his desert places, confronted his desire to enter the oblivion of the snowy woods, and drove on.”Hall’s essays are once both intimate portraits and learned treatises. He takes us on a pub crawl through the Welsh countryside with the word-mad Dylan Thomas; to the Faber & Faber office of T. S. Eliot, who had discovered more happiness in age than in youth; to a reading where Robert Frost’s public persona hid the truth; to Brooklyn for lunch with the enigmatic Marianne Moore; and to Italy and for a visit with the notorious Ezra Pound. By the time Hall met them, each poet was, he observed, “old enough to have detached from ongoing poetry, to feel alien to the ambitions of the grandchildren.”Also included are portraits of the poets who taught Hall as a writer: the unfailingly kind Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters, from whom he learned the most about poetry. Along the way are observations about many other poets and the literary cultures that sustained them.Contents include: “Vanity, Fame, Love, and Robert Frost,” “Dylan Thomas and Public Suicide,” “Notes on T. S. Eliot,” “Rocks and Whirlpools: Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters,” “Marianne Moore: Valiant and Alien,” and “Fragments of Ezra Pound.”For lovers of literature, this is a gorgeous remembrance and likely to compel an immediate visit to the poetry section of the nearest bookstore—as Hall writes, “Their presences have been emblems in my life, and I remember these poets as if I kept them carved in stone.”

Read more less

“Beautifully written and astutely observed. This is a marvelous book.”—Washington Post“For fans of The Perfect Storm, In the Heart of the Sea, and Bill Bryson on his sassiest days.”—Afar Travel Magazine and GuideAboard a sinking cruise ship, a journalist faces death and reconsiders life. “If you’re looking for a great read, look no further than The Passenger.”—San Francisco ExaminerIn March 2019, the Viking Sky cruise ship was struck by a bomb cyclone in the North Atlantic. Rocked by 50-foot swells and 40-knot gales, the ship lost power and began to drift straight toward the notoriously dangerous Hustadvika coast in Norway. This is the suspenseful, harrowing, funny, touching story by one passenger who contemplated death aboard that ship. Chaney Kwak is a travel writer used to all sorts of mishaps on the road, but this is a first even for him: trapped on the battered cruise ship, he stuffs his passport into his underwear just in case his body has to be identified. As the massive cruise ship sways in surging waves, Kwak holds on and watches news of the impending disaster unfold on Twitter, where the cruise ship’s nearly 1,400 passengers are showered with “thoughts and prayers.” Kwak uses his twenty-seven hours aboard the teetering ship to examine his family history, maritime tragedies, and the failing relationship back on shore with a man he’s loved for nearly two decades: the Viking Sky, he realizes, may not be the only sinking ship he needs to escape.The Passenger takes readers for an unforgettable journey from the Norwegian coast to the South China Sea, from post-WWII Korea to pandemic-struck San Francisco. Kwak weaves his personal experience into events spanning decades and continents to explore the serendipity and the relationships that move us—perfect for readers who love to discover world travel through the eyes of a perceptive and witty observer.

Read more less

A must-read for the craftsperson, artisan and artist. “In his beautiful book, Peter Korn invites us to understand craftsmanship as an activity that connects us to others, and affirms what is best in ourselves.”—Matthew Crawford, author of Shop Class as SoulcraftWoodworking, handicrafts —the rewards of creative practice, bringing something new and meaningful into the world through one’s own vision, make us fully alive. Peter Korn explains his search for meaning as an Ivy-educated child of the middle class who finds employment as a novice carpenter on Nantucket, transitions to self-employment as a designer/maker of fine furniture, takes a turn at teaching at Colorado’s Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and finally founds a school in Maine: the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, an internationally respected, non-profit institution.How does the making of objects shape our identities? How does creative work enrich our communities and society? What does the process of making things reveal to us about ourselves? Korn poignantly probes for answers in this book that is for the artist, artisan, crafter, do-it-yourselfer inside us all.

Read more less

“A deft combination of adventure, history, reportage and elegy.”—Washington Post A journey to the coast of North Sentinel Island, home to a tribe believed to be the most isolated human community on earth. The Sentinelese people want to be left alone and will shoot deadly arrows at anyone who tries to come ashore. As the web of modernity draws ever closer, the island represents the last chapter in the Age of Discovery—the final holdout in a completely connected world.In November 2018, a zealous American missionary was killed while attempting to visit an island he called “Satan’s last stronghold,” a small patch of land known as North Sentinel in the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean. News of the tragedy fascinated people around the world. Most were unaware such a place still existed in our time: an island unmolested by the advances of modern technology.Twenty years before the American missionary’s ill-fated visit, a young American historian and journalist named Adam Goodheart also traveled to the waters off North Sentinel. During his time in the Andaman Islands he witnessed another isolated tribe emerge into modernity for the first time.Now, Goodheart—a bestselling historian—has returned to the Andamans. The Last Island is a work of history as well as travel, a journey in time as well as place. It tells the stories of others drawn to North Sentinel’s mystery through the centuries, from imperial adventurers to an eccentric Victorian photographer to modern-day anthropologists. It narrates the tragic stories of other Andaman tribes’ encounters with the outside world. And it shows how the web of modernity is drawing ever closer to the island’s shores.The Last Island is a beautifully written meditation on the end of the Age of Discovery at the start of a new millennium. It is a book that will fascinate any reader interested in the limits—and dangers—of our modern, global society and its emphasis on ceaseless, unbroken connection.

Read more less

The liberating power of anger has rarely felt so good and healing as in this complete collection of a landmark in feminist poetry.“She digs her teeth into the slaveries of woman, she cries them aloud with such fulminating energy that the chains begin to melt of themselves. Reaching into the hive of her angers, she plucks out images of fear and delight that are transparent yet loaded with the darknesses of life. Diane Wakoski is an important and moving poet.”—The New York TimesIn 1971, Diane Wakoski published The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems to tremendous acclaim. In the decades that followed, she wrote additional “betrayal” poems, which are now collected here in one volume for the first time. Relevant, moving—at times shocking—it is Wakoski’s honesty and bravery as an artist that continues to astonish, delight, inspire, and liberate readers.Wakoski responds to betrayal in a variety of ways including fantasies such as drilling bullet holes into the bodies of unfaithful lovers. But even her anger can be winking, as in the book’s sly dedication to “all those men who betrayed me at one time or another, in hopes they will fall off their motorcycles and break their necks.” There is joy here because it is self-knowledge that the writer seeks, as in the collection’s title poem: So some white wolves and I will sing on your grave, old man and dance for the joy of your death. “Is this an angry statement?” “No, it is a statement of joy.” “Will the sun shine again?” “Yes, yes, yes,” because I’m going to dance dance danceDiane Wakoski’s art as a confessional, storytelling poet has rarely been equaled. Her revelations become shared emotional truth with readers. The collection’s new introduction by poet and Green Mountains Review editor Elizabeth A. I. Powell gives context to the long wake of Wakoski’s inspiring influence on generations of readers. Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch is for anyone who ever lost a love and wishes to embrace the freedom, rather than the pain, it can bring.

Read more less

A journey through both family history and the fascinating and quintessentially American history of New England’s Merrimack Valley, its farmers, and the immigrant workers caught up in the industrial textile age. After years of living away, Jane Brox made the decision to return to the family farm of her birth, where her aging father still tended the crops. Brox twines two narratives, personal and historic, as she captures the cadences of farm life and those who sustain it, at a time when the viability of both are waning. Amid the turmoil after her father’s death, Brox begins a search for her family’s story. As Brox explores, she also reflects on the place of the family farm as it evolved from the Pilgrims’ brutal progress at Plymouth to the modern world, where much of our food is produced by industrial agriculture while the family farm is both marginalized and romanticized. In the Merrimack Valley brings togeth

Read more less

In the desegregation era of the 1970s, a first grader copes with being bused to a white school in this story for young children about racism and an essential time of change. “One of the Ten Best Books of the Year,” The New York Times.Brewster is excited about starting first grade . . . until Mama announces that he'll be attending Central, a school in the white part of town. Mama says they have art and music and a library bursting with books, but Brewster isn’t so sure he’ll fit in.And he’s right. Being black at a white school isn't easy. Brewster winds up spending his first day in detention at the library. But there he meets a very special person: Miss O’Grady. The librarian sees into Brewster’s heart and gives him not only the gift of books but also encourages Brewster to believe in himself.This is an invaluable, unique, view into a tumultous time and the good that came into the lives of school children.

Read more less

A personal look at the buildings that define Yale University through the eyes of alumni. “The Stones of Yale is a delight—fresh and highly observant. I will be turning to its pages again and again, I have no doubt.”—David McCullough Artist Adam Van Doren wanted to know how Yale University’s buildings made people feel to live and to study in them. He spoke to alumni as diverse as actor Sam Waterston, the writer Christopher Buckley, Yale librarian Judith Schiff, former NFL great Calvin Hill, architect Cesar Pelli, among others, about their experiences and illustrates this book in gorgeous watercolor paintings of the buildings of Yale that interest him most. Rather than an architectural analysis of buildings, Van Doren explores the visceral experience of seeing them and being inside them. This is one-of-a-kind approach that will interest anyone who’s felt the intangible power of a building and a place.

Read more less

A board book especially for farm and country toddlers.In sweet pictures and rhyme, we are taken through the daily tasks of running the farm: milking, egg collecting, laundry, woodcutting, and more. The little old man, the little old lady, their cat, their dog, and other familiar farm animals are depicted in Andrea Wisnewski’s charming paper-cut style.Each quaint vignette contains artistic details that will enthrall children, while the text begs to be read aloud, time and again. An original in the time-honored tradition of children’s books on farm life, Little Old Farm Folk is an endearing little celebration of the rustic way of living. Or as Publishers Weekly called it, “A charmingly old-fashioned trip to the farm.”Andrea Wisnewski is also the author of Trio: The Tale of a Three-Legged Cat, Little Red Riding Hood, and Andrea Wisnewski Greeting Cards—all published by Godine. Trio was named one of the best picture books of the year by Kirkus Reviews and, of Little Red Riding Hood, School Library Journal said, “The rich colors and thick flowing lines are technically accomplished and lovely. The book’s design suits the content: it is simple and elegant.”

Read more less

In 1968 the photographer Richard Brown fulfilled a romantic childhood dream when he moved to the Northeast Kingdom, a remote corner of Vermont just barely entering the twentieth century. There he encountered a way of life that was fast disappearing, a land of sheep, cattle, work horses, wood-burning stoves, and small family-run farms far removed from the industrial Northeast. Determined to record it before it disappeared, he saw a pastoral vision where, “for the briefest interval, a window opened and the spirit of Vermont’s past—granite hills cleared and formed, hard lives lived and lost, struggle and endurance, a harsh land made starkly beautiful by nature and man—was made palpable.” He saw the land and also a people whose “endless hours of backbreaking, monotonous work were spent with a quiet ferocity” and who believed their “age-old labors were a struggle waged against time itself – labors that might just hold modernity at bay.” And Brown did record it, with an 8 x 10″ large plate view camera. Not only the hauntingly beautiful landscape but also the people who stayed and worked the stubborn hills and “did so with great but fierce attachment.” This is a great ode to an America that has passed before our eyes almost without comment or notice. It is a valiant, indeed a brilliant, effort to make the past tangible, to bring it back to life.

Read more less

“Writing with tenderness and understated humor, Wisnewski portrays disabilities as a simple fact of life—the obstacles that Trio surmounts are less about physical limitation than about learning how to use his body to get where he wants to be.”—Publishers WeeklyOne of the Best Children’s Picture Books of the Year—Kirkus ReviewsMeet Trio, the runt of the litter, born with only three legs, but very much the little cat that could. He lives his life as any other kitten would: pouncing, sneaking, and jumping like any other feline. Trio especially loves playing with the eleven chickens that share the garage and garden, and he is game to try all their activities: digging up bugs, rolling in the dust, and even caring for eggs. The latter requires real effort, especially making it up into the nesting box, but once he figures it out he returns to it faithfully every day. And his persistence pays off. One day, an egg starts hatching beneath him. Little does he know, the chick that pops out will be his best friend.This is a story about diversity, overcoming obstacles, and acceptance. It is a story children will love—and a natural conversation starter with your child about differences.

Read more less

A collection of quotations from pundits and poets, artists and authors for dog lovers There’s something new and memorable in here for everyone.James Charlton categorizes quotes into sections to easily locate a message to fit your mood or life circumstance. Lonely? Love and Loyalty. Aging? Old Dogs. Bad day at work? Barking and Biting. Cat scratched your furniture? Dogs Are Better. Despairing? Love a Dog. Witty and tender, with hundreds of quotes to choose from, this book doggedly compiles all the best words ever written or spoken about man’s best friend, all complemented by cartoonist Arnold Roth’s artwork. And remember what Mark Twain said: “Heaven goes by favor; if it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.”

Read more less

An alphabet book that celebrates the birth of the United States of America. Wendell Minor’s bright illustrations and expressive prose introduce young readers to the rich history behind the colonies and Revolutionary Era.A is for “Acts,” the British tax that incited unrest amongst American patriots. Z is for “Zane,” the daughter of Patriot Colonel Zane, Elizabeth, who saves the day by delivering more gunpowder for the deprived troops at Fort Henry. In between, Paul Revere, Mohawk Chief Joseph Brant, the Boston Tea Party, and the Liberty Bell, and many more people, places, and events of the young America grace these pages. A chronological timeline at the end puts all the events in order.

Read more less

A child’s art comes to life and takes him on an out-of-this-world adventure. In this bewitchingly wordless black-and-white picture book, one young child explores the boundless reaches of his imagination. Armed only with a pencil and a pad of paper, he transports himself to the moon, the deep sea, and remote jungles where he meets new friends, visits undiscovered words, and makes his way back home again to his own bed before dawn. Damon Lehrer's visual narrative, a penciled mix of line work and detailed graphite drawings, will appeal to readers of all ages who are invited to help tell the story.

Read more less