Search results for ""Author Howard Mansfield""

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

Read more less

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."

Read more less

Before Thomas Edison, light and fire were thought to be one and the same. Turns out, they were separate things altogether. This book takes a similar relationship, that of time and place, and shows how they, too, were once inseparable. Time keeping was once a local affair, when small towns set their own pace according to the rising and setting of the sun. Then, in 1883, the expanding railroads necessitated the creation of Standard Time zones, and communities became linked by a universal time. Here Howard Mansfield explores how our sudden interconnectedness, both physically, as through the railroad, and through inventions like the telegraph, changed our concept of time and place forever.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

When I grew up, World War II was omnipresent and hidden. This was also true of myfather's time in the Air Force. Like most of his generation, it was a rule with him not totalk about what he'd seen at war. You're not getting any war stories from me, he'd say.Cleaning up the old family house the year before he died, I was surprised to find a shortdiary of the bombing missions he had flown. Some of the missions were harrowing. Ibegan to fill in the details, and to be surprised again, this time by a history I thought Iknew.I Will Tell No War Stories is about undoing the forgetting in our family and in a societythat has hidden the horrors and cataclysm of a world at war. Some part of that forgettingwas necessary for the veterans, otherwise how could they come home, how could theyfind peace?I Will Tell No War Stories is, finally, about learning to live with history, a theme I haveexplored in some of my ear

Read more less

Before Thomas Edison, light and fire were thought to be one and the same. Turns out, they were separate things altogether. This book takes a similar relationship, that of time and place, and shows how they, too, were once inseparable. Time keeping was once a local affair, when small towns set their own pace according to the rising and setting of the sun. Then, in 1883, the expanding railroads necessitated the creation of Standard Time zones, and communities became linked by a universal time. Here Howard Mansfield explores how our sudden interconnectedness, both physically, as through the railroad, and through inventions like the telegraph, changed our concept of time and place forever.

Read more less

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.”

Read more less